Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 386

Young children quickly learn to combine words into sentences in increasingly sophisticated ways that follow the complex rules of grammar (de Villiers & de Villiers, 2014). Three-year-old children tend to use plurals, possessives, and past tense (Park, Yelland, Taffe, & Gray, 2012). They also tend to understand the use of pronouns such as I, you, and we. Similar to telegraphic speech, their sentences are short, leaving out words like a and the. However, their speech is more sophisticated than telegraphic speech because some pronouns, adjectives, and prepositions are included. Four- and 5-year-olds use four- to five-word sentences and can express declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences (Turnbull & Justice, 2016). Context influences the acquisition of syntax. Four-year-old children will use more complex sentences with multiple clauses, such as “I’m resting because I’m tired,” if their parents use such sentences (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002). Parental conversations and support for language learning are associated with faster and more correct language use (MacWhinney, 2015). Children often use run-on sentences, in which ideas and sentences are strung together.

“See? I goed on the slide!” called out Leona. Overregularization errors such as Leona’s are very common in young children. They occur because young children are still learning exceptions to grammatical rules. Overregularization errors are grammatical mistakes that young children make because they are applying grammatical rules too stringently (Marcus, 2000). For example, to create a plural noun, the rule is to add s to the word. However, there are many exceptions to this rule. Overregularization is expressed when children refer to foots, gooses, tooths, and mouses, which illustrates that the child understands and is applying the rules. Adult speakers find this usage awkward, but it is actually a sign of the child’s increasing grammatical sophistication. And despite all of the common errors young children make, one study of 3-year-olds showed that nearly three quarters of their utterances were grammatically correct. The most common error was in making tenses (e.g., eat/eated, fall/falled) (Eisenberg, Guo, & Germezia, 2012). By the end of the preschool years, most children use grammar rules appropriately and confidently.