TWO WORDS UTTERANCES ( PSYCHOLINGUISTIC )

In the middle 1960s, under the influence of Chomsky’s vision of linguistics, the first child language researchers assumed that language begins when words (or morphemes) are combined. Within a few months of producing one word utterances children will begin to produce two-word utterances. When child can produce two-word utterances, in General Stages of Linguistic Development that is include in Telegraphic Stage.

Typically children start to combine words when they are between 18 - 24 months of age, consisting of utterances generally two nouns or a noun and a verb. Some examples of this are:

·         Baby chair, meaning 'The baby is sitting on the chair' (each has it’s own intonation)

·         Doggie bark, meaning 'The dog is barking' (each has it’s own intonation)

The children are systematically simpler than adult speech. For example, the child function words are generally not used like the omission of inflections, such as -s, -ing, -ed, and conjunctions (and), articles (the, a), and prepositions (with) are omitted too.

In Roger Brown’s Research, Brown collected samples of spontaneous speech from three children. Here is an early attempt to write a “syntactic” grammar of two-word speech, first describing only 89 observed utterances (Table 1), then going “beyond the obtained sentences to the syntactic classes they suggest (Table 2) :

Table 1

Table 2

Then Brown and his co-workers started instead to describe two-word utterances in

semantic terms. The result was the identification of a small set of basic semantic relations that the children’s utterances seems to be expressing. Most common of these are summarized in the following table.

Table: Two Word Utterances, Roger Brown’s Meaning Relation

It seems that children when they first combine words talk about objects: pointing them

out, naming them, indicating their location, what they are like, who owns them, and who is doing things to them. They also talk about actions performed by people, and the objects and locations of these actions. Brown suggested that these are the concepts the child has just finished differentiating in the sensorimotor stage.

This kind of semantic characterization of children’s speech continues in current research. For example, the following table is redrawn from Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek, (1999, p. 151.) The terminology differs a little, and Recurrence and Disappearance have been added (or at least were not in Brown’s “top eight”), but other than this the picture is the same.

Two-Word Utterance	Probable meaning expressed	Possible gloss
Mommy sock	Possessor-possessed or Agent (acting on) an object	“That’s Mommy’s sock” or “Mommy, put on my sock”
More juice!	Recurrence	“I want more juice”
Allgone outside	Disappearance or Nonexistence	“The outside is allgone” (said after front door is closed)
Throw chicken	Action on object	“(Dad) is throwing the toy chicken”
Car go	Agent doing an action	“The car is going”
Sweater chair	Object at location	“The sweater is on the chair”
Little dog	Object and property	“The dog is little”
That Susan	Naming	“That is Susan” or “Her name is Susan”