First language acquisition is fundamental to children to become experienced language-users. It involves several stages. Each of them is characterised and takes place in different stages of time. In this article, Stage A (also known as two-word stage) and B (multi-word stage) of a child, named D, will be identified, and their differences will be discussed with the utterances of D at Stage A and B accordingly.
At Stage A, D produced utterances constructed by two to three distinct semantic units that contain actual meaning, instead of a random choice of words, with various combinations, such as Me up and Pyjamas off. Such utterances are called ‘microsentences’. Producing microsentences is a classic feature of the two-word stage of language development. The occurrence of Stage A began in eighteen-month and corresponded with the acknowledged initial time of occurrence of the two-word stage, which is around eighteen to twenty-month (Yule, 2006).
At Stage B, D produced significantly more complicated and longer utterances, which can possibly be recognised as sentences, than those at Stage A. The utterances bore a closer resemblance to adults’ speeches (Moonie, 2000). Such characteristic correlates with that of the multi-word stage of language development.
The two-word stage and multi-word stage differs in several aspects. In the following, four aspects, namely vocabulary size, syntactic, semantic, and morphological aspects, will be discussed.
At the two-word stage, hereafter known as Stage A, D’s vocabulary size is apparently smaller than that at the multi-word stage (Stage B). Utterances, such as Me up and Me chair, with the lexical verb missing, indicates the lack of functional words at Stage A. McGregor (2014) points out that children at the two-word stage have a limited active vocabulary of around fifty words.
While at Stage B, D produced utterances with a wider lexicon, e.g., verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc., and provide more complete meanings without the audience guessing. For instance, ‘I turned the light on.’, is a grammatical declarative statement which contains the correct phrasal verb and accusative and suggests a complete meaning, unlike utterances, which suggests partial meaning, at Stage A.
On the syntactic aspect, utterances at Stage A can barely demonstrate syntax whilst those at stage B can closely follow syntactic rules and manifest the use of tenses. At Stage A, only a few words are put together in the correct order. For example, ‘Put ball.’ shows the correct order of an acussative following a verb, despite the missing of determiners and a prepositional complement, and ‘… blanket fall.’ shows another order of a verb following a nominative, in spite of missing the -s morpheme which exhibits correct subject-verb agreement.
Contrastingly, at Stage B, in utterances, such as ‘I… see a truck…’, ‘Where my orange-cup?’, ‘I turned the light on.’, and ‘I taking food out of my hair.’, the use of function words, e.g., the article, ‘a’, sentence structure of form of subject-verb-object, wh-question, and the -ed morpheme showing that the action is in the past and the -ing morpheme showing that the action is ongoing can be found. Such uses suggest a certain level of mastery of the tacit knowledge of grammar which is absent at Stage A.
On the semantic aspect, utterances at Stage B display the use of grammatical features, e.g., negation, imperative statement, and grounded nominals, and tense and aspects whilst those at Stage A does not. At Stage A, D produced simple microsentences in which neither grammatical features nor tenses and aspects are shown. Meanwhile at Stage B, utterance, for instance, ‘Danny don’t getting all wet.’ illustrates the operation of negation and imperative statement which commands Danny to not get wet.
In another utterance at Stage B, ‘I turned the light on.’, a grounded nominal, the light, is found. The use of the definite determiner, which is regarded as the head of the noun clause in cognitive grammar, in a nominal implies a ground. It, moreover, specifies the meaning of the nominal, a light in a particular context, instead of the general meaning of light. Furthermore, as aforementioned, -d and -ing morphemes exist in utterances at Stage B and suggest meanings of past and ongoing actions accordingly.
On the morphological aspect, D at Stage B demonstrated consciousness of adding inflectional morphemes, which provides extra information, to words while s/he did not. At Stage A, D produced the utterance, ‘Fall, blanket fall.’, which does not contain the -s morpheme that indicates the third-person singular subject (Lockley, 2014). It can be deduced that D was not aware of the necessity of doing so.
D, however, at Stage B, produced the utterance, ‘Where this goes?’ with the awareness of what he needs to add an -es morpheme after the verb. An utterance like‘…little boys’ also exhibits that D understand how to show the plurality of noun by adding an -s morpheme after the noun.
Isn’t it intriguing to see how a child acquire their first language? I hope this will be of interest to you and gives you the drive to look more into the topic!
References
Kumar, Ela. 2012. Natural Language Processing. New Delhi: I. K. International Publishing House.
Lockley, Sina. 2014. Inflectional and Derivational Morphology: A Comparison. Munich: GRIN Verlag.
McGregor, William. 2014. Linguistics: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury.
Moonie, Neil. 2000. Advanced Health and Social Care. Oxford: Heinemann Educational.
Yule, George. 2006. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
