Associating vocal responses with objects and events is only a small part of the total process of learning a language. After the child has acquired a modest vocabulary he begins to form sentences.

Eventually he must comprehend long, complicated sentences and produce such sentences on his own. This a vastly more complicated problem than learning to use single words, and it seems unlikely that grammatical competency can be acquired by learning to associated the one word sequence with another.

There are too many possible combinations for each one to be learned via process of operant or classical conditioning. It seems more likely that the child learns rules for generating acceptable sequences of words.

Even as adults we may not be able to verbalize the exact form of these rules, but we know when an Utterance is correct. We know, for example, that ran handsome rapidly boys is not a sentence because the word do not follow the sequence characteristic of English sentences.

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We find this sequence unacceptable, not because we have never heard it before, but because it does not match the rules we employ for generating sentences.

Another reason to doubt that simple learning principles can account for the child’s acquisition of grammatical sequence lies in-the fact that many of the child’s earliest grammatical constructions are not limitations of adult sentences

In their spontaneous speech two year olds will say things like all- gone shoe and go car Daddy, which undoubtedly the heavy never heard an adult say. And a child imitating parental speech does not mimic the entire phrase but leaves out prepositions, articles, suffixes, prefixes, and auxiliary words as illustrated in the complex below.

Speech at this stage of development (at about two years) has been termed telegraphic speech. The child usually preserves the order of the parent’s speech but leaves out the less important words or word parts.

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The same telegraphic quality also is present in the child’s spontaneous speech at this age. The words he selects to repeat or to use on his own are usually those that carry the most meaning as well as those that receive the most stress or emphasis. If you read aloud the parent’s sentences given above, you will note that the stressed words are the ones repeated by the child.

In most languages the stressed words are the ones repeated by the child. In most languages the stressed words are also the words that convey the meaning of the sentence. In English, for example, we seldom emphasize articles or prepositions in speaking; and the same is true for languages such as French, Russian, or Spanish

In German, however, more emphasis is laid on the articles a (ein) and the das) and the possessive pronoun my (mein), and these words tend to be preserved by the German child in telegraphic speech (Park, 1970).

Thus in early speech (whether imitative or spontaneous) the child tends to preserve those elements of adult speech that the most meaningful and the most salient or perceptually distinct. Proper word order is one of the cues to meaning that children appear to discriminate early.

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Two year olds, shown the pictures illustrated in Figure 10.8 and asked to point to the one where The dog is biting the cat (or the cat is biting the dog), will answer correctly 60 percent of the time, and three year olds give 85 percent correct responses (Brown, 1973).

Despite their brevity, the child’s early utterances express most of the basic functions of language. Many of the first two-word sentences are devoted to naming objects (see shoe) and describing actions (cargo). Quantitative and qualitative modifiers appear early (pretty girl, big boat), and some form of negation develops a little later (no hungry, not wash).

Cross-cultural studies show a remarkable similarity in the functions served by early speech and the form and sequence in which they occur. It gives examples of some of the major functions served by the two-word sentences of children speaking different languages.

At this stage of language development the child comprehends much more than he can express, Moreover, the Intends to communicate more than his two-word sentences say on the surface; thus, the sentence Mommy book may mean

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That is mommy’s book in one Instance and Mommy, give me the book in another. It Is clear from the context In which these utterances occur that the child understands the differences In meaning, but apparently Is limited at this stage sentences of two words In length, In order to speak so that someone other than mommy will understand, the child must learn to produce longer sentences with correct grammatical structure.