Early grammatical development in Cypriot Greek

Abstract

The current study investigates the grammatical development of toddlers acquiring Cypriot Greek as their first language. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) was used to collect data from parents of children between 18 and 30 months of age. This is the first large-scale study presenting information on the grammatical development of children in Cyprus, as well as comparisons between grammatical development and other aspects of language development, such as lexical development. The data included information on several grammatical features, such as the formation of plural in nouns, or person in verbs, as well as children’s utterance length (MLU3-w) as a measure of morphosyntactic abilities. The analysis showed a significant increase with age in children’s grammatical complexity (the number of grammatical features produced by children), length of utterance as well as children’s lexicons, with an overall advantage of girls over boys. Additionally, the different grammatical features were shown to develop at different times and pace, with an interesting increase at the end of the second and the beginning of the third year. Overall grammatical development is shown to be ‘piecemeal’, supporting usage-based accounts of morphological development.