Syntactic Categories in the Speech of Young Children

This article demonstrates that very young children have knowledge of a range of syntactic categories. Speech samples from six children aged 2 years to 2 years, 5 months, with Mean Lengths of Utterance (MLUs) ranging from 2.93 to 4.14, were examined for evidence of six syntactic categories: Determiner, Adjective, Noun, Noun Phrase, Preposition, and Prepositional Phrase. Performance was evaluated by the conformance of the children's speech to criteria developed for each category. Known syntactic diagnostics served as models for the criteria developed; the criteria exploited distributional regularities. All children showed evidence of all categories, except for the lowest MLU child, whose performance was borderline on Adjectives and Prepositional Phrases. The results suggest that children are sensitive very early in life to abstract, formal properties of the speech they hear and must be credited with syntactic knowledge at an earlier point than heretofore generally thought. The results argue against various semantic hypotheses about the origin of syntactic knowledge. Finally, the methods and results may be applicable to future investigations of why children's early utterances are short, of the nature of children's semantic categories, and of the nature of the deviance in the speech of language-deviant children and adults.