Grammatical Development Research Articles

Early Grammatical Development: Nature or Nurture?

As many people have become concerned about early language acquisition and hold their own different perspectives, the emphasis has been put on this aspect and abundant research studies have been implemented. Both parties held firm to their own views, one believes that can be attributed into input-driven tradition which relies more heavily on our environment as opposed to the other group supports Chomsky’s universal grammar, that considered as early language acquisition aptitude is the nature and innateness of individuals that infants are born with. In this review, we are going to show our views and reveal the weakness of mechanism of universal grammar (UG) and its nature. We show the arguments for and against UG and some ideas about input-driven theory at the same time, to demonstrate our critical analysis to nature and nurture. In my view, I reckon that environment has a universal impact between UG And input-driven, referring to the outcome of previous studies, children might use universal grammar more in their early stage and are affected more by the input-driven in the subsequent learning phase, but both of them cannot be separated from the environment. This research clearly explains how children acquire a language in the early stage, which promotes the development of language pedagogy.

Moving beyond the initial stages in L3/Ln research: toward theorising L3 development

ABSTRACT This article serves as an introduction to the present special issue, which focuses on third language (L3) development. It provides a brief overview of the theoretical foundations necessary to map L3 (grammatical) development, with particular attention to the recently proposed Cumulative Input Threshold Hypothesis (Cabrelli & Iverson, 2023). Additionally, the introduction offers a brief overview of the six contributions included in this issue, originally presented at the Workshop on Multilingual Language Acquisition, Processing, and Use, held at King’s College London in 2024. The introduction concludes by outlining what I consider to be the next logical steps in the study of L3 grammatical development.

A Study on the Using of Endings (“Eomi”) of 3- to 5-Year-Old Children in Spontaneous Language Samples

Objectives: Considering that language development is the development of language use ability, endings, which are essential for sentence construction, can be said to be a good indicator of language development as well as grammatical development. This study attempted to systematically and comprehensively examine the overall and subcategory use of endings in spontaneous speech for children aged 3 to 5 whose syntactic skills are rapidly developing. Methods: Language samples containing 50 utterances were collected from a total of 150 children aged 3 to 5 years (50 in each age group) through a semi-structured procedure. ‘Eomi’s are classified into four subcategories: prefinal Eomi (PE), Sentence-closing Eomi (SE), Connecting Eomi (CE), Transformative Eomi (TE). The number of total Eomi (NTE) use, the number of different Eomi (NDE) of overall Eomi & all subcategories of Eomi were analyzed. Results: The NTE & NDE of overall Eomi and all subcategories except SE significantly increased between the 3-year-old group and two older groups, but not between two older groups. Regression analysis demonstrated that the NDE of final Eomi and the NTE of CE significantly explained chronological age in the 3-year-old group. Conclusion: It was confirmed that NDE along with NTE of overall and all subcategories of Eomi consistently increased actively between the ages of 3 and 4. Also NDE along with NTE of Eomi should be considered in language assessment and intervention.

The Emergence and Development of Palestinian Arabic Lexicon and Morphosyntax From 18 to 36 Months: A Communicative Development Inventory Study.

This study presents a comprehensive exploration of lexical and grammatical development in Palestinian Arabic (PA). The study aims to test the validity of the Palestinian Arabic Communicative Development Inventory (PA-CDI) as well as generate growth curves for lexical and morphosyntactic development, examine the order of emergence of both lexical and morphosyntactic categories, and explore the contribution of demographic and developmental factors to language development. Data were collected from 1,399 parents of PA children aged 18-36 months using an online PA-CDI. The results show that as age increased, so did lexical and morphosyntactic production, along with considerable variability across individuals. While lexical development in PA resembles the order observed in other languages with nouns preceding verbs and adjectives, morphosyntactic development indicates early emergence of verbal inflectional morphology prior to noun pluralization or negation. Age of word combination and health problems are predictive of lexical and morphosyntactic development, and so are parental concerns. Our findings indicate the potential of the PA-CDI as an assessment tool for lexical and morphosyntactic development among PA-speaking children in Israel. Our developmental growth curves may also be used to identify children at risk for developmental language disorder, particularly those falling below the 10th percentile, thus allowing for early identification and early intervention. The use of background variables, specifically parental concerns, health issues, and word combinations, along with the PA-CDI, could potentially enhance the precision of language delay assessment. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26026777.

The interplay of lexical and grammatical development in Greek-Albanian bilingual children: evidence from the majority and the heritage language

ABSTRACT The present paper aims to investigate the interplay of lexical and grammatical development in school-aged Greek-Albanian bilingual children by providing evidence both from majority, Greek, and heritage, Albanian. To this end, 47 8 to 10-year-old bilingual children were tested by means of expressive vocabulary tests in Greek and in Albanian, while their grammatical skills were evaluated by means of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task administered in both languages. Additionally, input-related measures in both languages, such as oral language practices, literacy, and educational practices were used to assess the bilingual experience and examine how it would correlate with lexical and grammatical skills. The analysis showed that within each language, lexical and grammatical skills were closely related both for the majority and the heritage language, while when examining across-language effects, grammatical skills in the heritage language were correlated with grammatical skills in the majority language. Concerning the role of input, we found that input in the heritage language supported skills both in the heritage and the majority language. The study's contribution is that by providing novel evidence from this specific language pair it shows that supporting the use of heritage language can boost language skills in both languages.

O‘zbek va rus tillarida fe’l bog‘lovchilarni qo‘llash imkoniyatlari

In some cases, during the grammatical development of the language, verbs are not used inspeech. Another feature is that the non-expressive use in speech of verbs that appeared in the subsequentperiod in the Uzbek language was formed directly in the Russian language

Exploring grammatical development in children aged 2;6 to 7: a novel approach using elicited production

ABSTRACT The assessment of children’s grammatical skills is a crucial component of diagnosing language disorders. Elicited production is a commonly used method for obtaining data on a child’s productive language abilities. We introduce a new instrument developed as part of the third edition of a standardised test battery for German. This instrument utilises elicited production, wherein participants describe coloured pictures depicting everyday situations, in order to generate four test scores: mean length of utterances, completeness of utterances, and two grammar scores comprising relevant target structures. The construction of the grammar scores was inspired by the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), modified for German and computerised. The detailed results provide a comprehensive profile of a child’s syntactic and morphological strengths and weaknesses. Analysis of data collected from 348 monolingual German children who formed part of the norming sample, aged between 2;6 and 6;11 years of age, revealed age-related changes in these scores. Additionally, the age range was determined for both grammatical milestones and ‘red flags’, which may indicate potential problems in language development. In conclusion, the newly developed, time-efficient instrument allows for a detailed assessment of grammatical skills, identification of potential intervention targets, and facilitates various research objectives.

Studi Diakronis Pronomina Persona Pertama aku dan kami dalam Bahasa Jawa

In Old Javanese, the personal pronouns aku and kami can appear simultaneously in a speech and refer to the same person. However, in Modern Javanese first-person pronouns of kami are no longer used in daily conversation; while aku was also limited in the ngoko register. This research focuses on changing the grammatical aspects of the personal pronouns aku and kami diachronically using a grammaticalization and corpus linguistics approach (Mair, 2004; 2012). The data sources used in this research come from literary texts in the form of prose and poetry from the 10th century to the 21st century. In this research, Antconc is used as a data processing tool by utilizing the concordance and frequency row features. Based on frequency, the use of the personal pronouns aku and kami competed with each other from the 10th century to the 18th century. The personal pronouns aku and kami also undergo grammatical development. Bound forms of personal pronouns aku and kami can be attached to nouns, verbs, and prepositions. However, in their development, the bound form can only be attached to nouns. The ability of the bound forms of the pronouns aku and kami to attach to verbs and prepositions is discontinued.

Влияние португальского языка на глагольную систему креольского языка Макао: семантика и функционирование макаоанского причастия в сравнении с португальским

The research aims to determine which morphological and syntactic elements of the participle in Macau Creole Portuguese were inherited from Portuguese and whether this indicates the influence of the Portuguese language not only on the lexical composition, but also on the grammatical system of Macanese patois, which developed on the basis of Portuguese. The participle is one of the two morphologically distinguished verb forms in Macanese patois. The paper analyzes the use of single participles, related and absolute participle constructions functioning as attributes and adverbials, as well as the participation of the participle in the formation of analytical verb forms. The work is novel in that it is the first to describe the functioning of the participle in Macanese patois. Besides, Macau Creole Portuguese itself is among the least studied living Creole languages based on Portuguese. As a result of the research, a set of functions of the Macanese participle inherited from the Portuguese participle was determined, the semantic and grammatical development of the participle was found specifically in Macau Creole Portuguese, which suggests that this verb form is productive. Thus, the significant contribution of the Portuguese language to the verb system of Macau Creole Portuguese was revealed.

Explicit instruction improves the comprehension of Spanish object relatives by young monolingual children

Abstract The present study assessed the comprehension of Spanish object relative (OR) clauses by 6- and 7-year-old children before and after a brief training session targeting the structural differences between ORs and subject relatives. In addition, we investigated the potential relationships between OR comprehension on the one hand and vocabulary size and non-verbal intelligence quotient (IQ) on the other. Comprehension of ORs was very poor at the pre-test but improved considerably after training. Further improvement was observed between the immediate post-test and a delayed post-test, suggesting that the knowledge acquired during training had been integrated into the children’s developing linguistic systems. Non-verbal IQ and vocabulary were not found to predict comprehension accuracy. We take these results to suggest that children’s difficulties with ORs are better explained by their experience with this construction than by maturational factors and that explicit contrast and feedback can bolster grammatical development in L1 acquisition.

METHODS OF FORMING GRAMMATICAL CORRECTNESS OF SPEECH IN PRESCHOOLERS

The article is devoted to the study of theoretical aspects and methodological features of the formation of the grammatical structure of speech of preschool children. The paper presents the main approaches of researchers regarding the problem of research, examines the essence of grammatical development of older preschoolers and ways to implement it in pre-school educational institutions.

Pengaruh Penggunaan Media Sosial Tiktok Terhadap Perkembangan Karakter Peserta Didik

Observational evidence showing behavioral and grammatical development in low-income students was the driving force of this research. Therefore, in an effort to improve student learning outcomes, researchers carried out action studies in the classroom. The objectives of this research are as follows: (1) Identify the factors that cause students' low character development (2) Understand how the use of TikTok social media affects students' character development; (3) Understand the important role of parents in monitoring their children's media use at home. Thirty-two fifth grade students participated in this investigation. This research measures the developmental domain of students' characteristics in terms of behavior and grammar. As a result, it was found that the development of students' characteristics can change in positive or negative directions through TikTok social media, it just depends again on parenting patterns and parental supervision of these students. The qualitative method provides data based on direct answers given by students to questions. provided by researchers regarding the problems that occur. This data encourages teachers to be able to respond and provide direction and control student behavior and develop students to have good and regular grammar.

Child Heritage Speakers’ Overregularization of Spanish Past Participles

The current study investigated overregularization of Spanish irregular past participles (e.g., dicho ‘said’, regularized as decido) among 20 child heritage speakers of Spanish in New Mexico, ages 5;1–11;9. Overregularization occurs when a child produces an irregular form analogously to its regular counterpart (e.g., eated instead of ate). Typically, children first produce the irregular form and then, after they have learned a morphological pattern, they overapply it to the irregular form. Ultimately, children retreat from overregularization and once again produce the target irregular form. While there has been a wealth of studies on monolingual children’s overregularizations, very few have investigated this phenomenon in child heritage speakers, who may develop their grammars diversely due to their exposure to the heritage language. This study analyzed the impact of age, Spanish language experience, Spanish morphosyntax proficiency, and lexical frequency on overregularization among the 13/20 children who produced past participles (n = 233) in response to an elicited production task. Participles were overregularized at high rates (74%), resulting in forms like ponido (‘put’, cf: puesto). Results from a regression analysis indicate that overregularization was more likely among the younger children, the children with lower morphosyntax scores, and with lower-frequency participles. Further, an interaction between morphosyntax score and lexical frequency indicated that children with higher scores overregularized with lower frequency participles, but not higher frequency ones, whereas children with low scores overregularized with both low- and high-frequency forms. In summary, child heritage speakers overregularize Spanish past participles at high rates, and the retreat from overregularization is tied to overall grammatical development and lexical frequency, suggesting that the acquisition of irregular participles is dependent on experiencing multiple instances of the irregular verb form.

Implicit Grammatical Gender Representation in Italian Children with Autism without Intellectual/Language Disorder.

Grammatical language development in individuals with autism (without intellectual/language impairment) is mostly qualitatively comparable to language development in typically developing children of the same age. The majority of tasks used to study grammatical development require explicit performance (use of verbal language). Here, we administered an implicit categorization task (by biological sex) to understand which markers children use to implicitly infer grammatical gender representation in Italian (a gendered language where grammatical gender can be inferred via a determiner and/or word ending). Participants were asked to categorize photos of animals, relying on the names that differed in regard to the grammatical markers involved (i.e., lexical semantic, phonological, syntactic or phonological + syntactic). Children with autism displayed the same patterns observed in typically developing children: the lexical-semantic marker was categorized more accurately, followed in decreasing order by the phonological-syntactic marker and the phonological marker. The syntactic marker was the most difficult to categorize for both groups. In addition, children with autism showed an advantage in grammatical gender representation when using formal/grammatical markers than when using lexical/semantic markers. Such an implicit assessment allows for the investigation of more nuanced linguistic representations other than those expressed by traditional assessments.

Expressive Language Profiles in a Clinical Screening Sample of Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This cross-sectional study aimed to depict expressive language profiles and clarify lexical-grammatical interrelationships in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during the administration of the simplified Chinese Psychoeducational Profile-Third Edition screening. We collected naturalistic language samples from 81 (74 boys, seven girls) 2- to 7-year-old (Mage = 55.6 months, SD = 15.17) Mandarin-speaking children with ASD in clinician-child interactions. The child participants were divided into five age subgroups with 12-month intervals according to their chronological age. Computer-assisted part-of-speech tagging, constituency analysis, and dependency analysis addressed the developmental trajectories of early lexical and grammatical growth in each age subgroup. Significant within-ASD differences were observed in content words, function words, and lexical categories. Nouns and verbs were the predominant lexical categories, while noun types overwhelmed verb types in children over 3 years old. The grammatical development of 5- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with ASD was better than that of 3- to 4-year-old children. The trends of syntactic structures, grammatical relations, and grammatical complexity in each age group were similar. Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD produce more lexicons with increasing age. They preserve the noun bias as a universal mechanism in early lexical learning. Moreover, their developmental trajectories of grammatical growth were comparable in each age subgroup. In addition, their lexicons and grammar were synchronically developed during early language acquisition.

The next station: chunking of değİl ‘not’ collocations in Turkish Sign Language

Abstract More recently, grammaticalization theorists have become increasingly aware of the role of collocations in grammatical development. One of these roles is to define phonetic reductions and fusion in frequent collocations as constructionalization. Based on frequency of occurrences, the present study explores the implications of high-frequency collocations in Turkish Sign Language for grammaticalization and offers a novel account of constructional change of değİl ‘not’ on usage-based grounds. Specifically, the study suggests that (i) the chunking process is not language-specific within the spoken modality, as noted previously in the literature, (ii) the frequency of collocations is strongly correlated with phonetic reduction and duration, (iii) the fusional characteristics of [sign + değİl] collocations can be classified under four reduced constructional schemas, (iv) the monosyllabicity of a scheme appears to be criterion for it to be productive in signed modality and (v) the semantic changes of frequent [sign + değİl] collocations are related to the notion of subjectification in TİD.

Noun and Verb Lexicons Differentially Predict Later Grammatical Development in Mandarin-Speaking Children With and Without Late Language Emergence.

The current investigation evaluated the extent to which early noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes predicted later grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with and without late language emergence (LLE) using a parent report. In Study 1, the parents of 24 Mandarin-speaking children with typical language filled out the toddler version of Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Development Inventory-Taiwan (MCDI-T) when these children were 24 and 36 months old. In Study 2, the parents of 23 children with LLE completed the same form when these children were 24, 36, and 48 months old. Noun, verb, and adjective lexicon sizes and grammatical complexity scores were computed from the MCDI-T form for each child. Study 1 showed that verb lexicon size, but not noun or adjective lexicon size, at 24 months predicted grammatical complexity scores at 36 months for children with typical language. Study 2 revealed that noun lexicon size, but not verb or adjective lexicon size, at 24 months predicted grammatical complexity scores at 36 months for children with LLE. Noun lexicon size at 36 months was also the only significant predictor for grammatical complexity scores at 48 months in children with LLE. Noun and verb lexicon size differentially predicted later grammatical outcomes in young Mandarin-speaking children with and without LLE. The finding suggested that children with LLE may have approached grammatical learning differently from their typical peers due to the small verb lexicon size in the early phase of language development.

Developing Pedagogical Applications for Teaching Politeness Strategies in Advanced English as a Foreign Language Classrooms

The field of English as a foreign language (EFL) strives to promote students' proficiency by equipping them with proper grammatical and lexical skills. However, EFL textbooks often neglect the teaching of pragmatics which can lead to cross-cultural communication failures for EFL learners. EFL learners often struggle with traditional language teaching approaches that prioritize grammatical development over pragmatic skills. This paper aims to address this gap by focusing on promoting the use of politeness strategies among EFL learners in cross-cultural communication, particularly in email correspondences with college professors. The proposed teaching activities are based on the Linguistic Theory of Politeness and the 3Ds framework within the context of the Communicative Repertoire Approach. This paper aims to assist advanced EFL learners in effectively employing politeness strategies when writing email requests to college professors, by offering practical pedagogical applications that enhance EFL learners' ability to express their communicative intentions clearly and avoid any potential misunderstanding or misinterpretation by their college professors.

The grammar of typically developing Oromo-speaking 3-year-olds

This study investigates the grammatical skills of typically developing Oromo-speaking preschool-age children and lays the foundation for a language assessment tool for Oromo, a Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia. The current study used a standard picture–based elicitation task that evaluated children’s accuracy in producing grammatical utterances. Language samples were collected from 44 monolingual 3- to 4-year-old Oromo children with typical language development. The percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU) was computed and error types were analyzed. The average level of grammatical accuracy as measured by PGU was 69%, with a large amount of variability. The data for Oromo 3-year-olds showed a variety of infrequent error types. The results of the study provide crucial foundational knowledge on grammatical development in Oromo, which could form the basis of future language assessments and diagnostic materials.

The Norwegian CDI-III as an assessment tool for lexical and grammatical development in preschoolers.

Parental report instruments are a non-invasive way to assess children's language development and have proved to give both valid and reliable results when used with children under the age of 2;6 (and in some cases up to 3). In this study we examine the newly developed Norwegian edition of a language assessment tool for older preschoolers: MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory III (CDI-III), investigating whether this parental report tool can be used for assessing the language of monolingual Norwegian-speaking children between 2;6 and 4 years. NCDI-III results for 100 children between 2;6 and 4.0 are presented. All sections were significantly intercorrelated. All sections except Pronunciation showed growth with age. Internal consistency was measured both in terms of Cronbach's alpha and corrected item-scale correlation, and the results are discussed considering features of item difficulty distribution. Methodological considerations are discussed, as well as implications relevant both for possible later revisions and for CDI-III adaptations to new languages.