One Word Stage

1. One Word Stage • Child uses single word utterances from 1 to 18 months. • Often this is used in a naming function – i.e to label something. • But sometimes used to convey more complex messages – ie. ‘juice’ may mean ‘I want more juice’ or ‘I’ve spilt my juice’ – these are called holophrases.

2. Grammatical Development • A child’s ability to arrange words in an appropriate order (their syntactical development) happens in the following stages: • One word stage • Two word stage • Telegraphic stage

3. Two Word Stage • Usually start to appear at 18 months • Usually used in grammatically correct sequence ie. • Subject + verb – ‘Jenny sleep’ • Verb + object – ‘draw doggie’ • Subject + object – ‘Suzy juice’ • When a child repeats what an adult is saying they usually omit some words but keep important ones and they are usually in the correct order

4. Acquisition of Inflections • Cruttenden (1979) – 3 stages: • Words learnt independently without understanding of general grammatical rules – i.e at first they correctly use plural ‘feet’ and past tense ‘ran’ • Show an awareness of general principles and apply these rules even when the words are irregular ie. ‘foots’ and ‘runned’ – this is called overgeneralisation • Inflections are used correctly, even irregular forms. • Berko’s (1958) ‘Wugs’ experiment indicates when a child has grasped grammatical rules rather than just imitating what they hear others say.

5. Acquisition of Negatives • Again, 3 stages: • Dependence on words ‘no’ and ‘not’ i.e. ‘’no want’ • During third year a wider range of words such as ‘don’t’ and ‘can’t’ begin to be used • More negative forms are acquired i.e. ‘didn’t’ and ‘isn’t’ and these are used in the correct constructions more often

6. Acquisition of Interrogatives • 3 stages • During two word stage, rely on intonation alone – / ‘daddy gone’ 2. At age of two, question words are acquired – what, where, why etc. – but not yet using auxiliary verbs i.e. ‘where daddy gone’ rather than ‘where has daddy gone’ 3. In third year begin to use auxiliary verbs and learn to make questions by reversing the order of subject and verb i.e. ‘Joe is here’ / ‘is Joe here’

7. Telegraphic Stage • From age of 2 children begin producing 3 and 4 word utterances. • Some of these will be grammatically complete but others will have elements missing ie. ‘daddy home now’ • They include key words but miss out others such as determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions (like telegrams) • By age of 3 these items are beginning to be used regularly, sentences contain more than one clause and conjunctions begin to be used. • Inflectional affixes are also acquired during this period – ‘-ing ‘-s’ ‘-ed’ endings