CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Language is a very important part of life. Communication between
people not only enables us to understand one-another, but aids in
developing relationships and allowing us to communicate our problems,
suggestions and plans. A major characteristic distinguishing human beings
from their nearest primate relatives is the use of language. A central
question in this regard is how human beings maintain the conventions of a
particular language across generations in a speech community, that is to say,
how children acquire a language. During the last decades, of special interest
to many developmental psycholinguists is the question of how children
acquire the syntactic structure of a language, because they do not hear an
adult speaking in abstract syntactic categories and schemas but only in
concrete and particular words and expressions. The best known answer to
this question is that children do not have to learn or construct abstract
syntactic structures at all, but rather they already possess them as a part of
their innate language faculty. It is argued that all human beings acquire a
language, but there are different languages in the world, and it seems any
human being is capable of learning any of these as a native language with
equal ease.
In order to speak a language as adults do, children need to have acquired
five areas of linguistic competence: Phonology, Lexis, Semantics, Syntax
(Grammar) and Pragmatics. There is no child fails to learn a native
language, and it is learned largely before the age of 5. Children
automatically develop syntactic rules without explicit instruction and they
learn it simply by listening to others speak around them. Almost all little
ones learn how to form words and sentences in a similar order, beginning
with single syllables and graduating to more complex ideas like tense. In
just a few short years, a child goes from no language at all to forming
cohesive sentences following grammatical rules. This process is called
Syntactic Development. So, it is important to know how the syntactic

development of children, how children acquire the language, what stages of

this development and their relation to the psychology.
B. Problem Formulation
Based on the background above, the problems discussed can be formulated
as follows:
1. What is Syntactic Development?
2. What is the relationship between Psycholinguistics and Syntactic
Development?
3. What are the stages of Syntactic Development?
4. What are factors affecting acquisition of syntax (sentence pattern) in
Syntactic Development?
5. How to measure the Syntactic Development of Language?
6. What are the disorders of Syntactic Development on childrens
language development?
C. Objective
1. To know what actually syntactic development, the relationship with
psycholinguistics, the affecting factors of syntactic development on
children, the stages of syntactic development and about its measure
and disorders.

CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A. Definition

In Linguistics, syntax is a traditional terms for the study the rules

governing the combination of words to form sentences. It is distinguished
from morphology, which is the study of word structure.

Syntax is the

organization and structure of a sentences components. The concept was

found in the Greek language where the word syntax stands for a setting out
together or an arrangement. The definition of syntactic itself is relating to
the rules of language, while development itself means that the way something
grows or changes and becomes more advanced. Syntactic development can be
defined as the way or the growth of first language acquisition using the rules
of word combination to form sentences by children.
Almost all little ones learn how to form words and sentences in a similar
order, beginning with single syllables and graduating to more complex ideas
like tense, goes from no language at all to forming cohesive sentences
following grammatical rules. This process is called Syntactic Development.
Syntax refers to the rules used to combine words to make sentences, and
syntactic development is the way children learn these rules.
Recent interest in the acquisition of syntax has been a natural outcome of
emerging concerns in psychology with childrens early intellectual
development and in linguistics with the characterization of human language.
For psychologists, the understanding of development involves specifying
intellectual start points as well as the processes by which mature forms of skill
are achieved. For linguists, understanding of syntax involves specifying the
nature of the grammars that underlie the ability to produce an infinite number
of sentences of varying degrees of complexity. In this context, the acquisition
of syntax represents a fascinating aspect of cognitive development. During the
first few years of life, and across a wide range of environments, children
master the intricate patterning of linguistic units that make up the grammar of
their language and become able to use the language to express their thoughts
and feelings.
B. Relationship between Psycholinguistics and Syntactical Development
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the
psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use,
comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were
largely philosophical or educational schools of thought, due mainly to their

location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how
the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology,
neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study
how the brain processes language and less so the known processes of social
sciences,

human

development,

communication

theories

and

infant

development, among others.

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field. Hence, it is studied by
researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, such as psychology,
cognitive science, linguistics, and speech and language pathology.
Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be
divided into answering the following questions: (1) how do children acquire
language (language acquisition)?; (2) how do people process and comprehend
language (language comprehension)?; (3) how do people produce language
(language production)?; and (4) how do people acquire a new language
(second language acquisition)? Subdivisions in psycholinguistics are also
made based on the different components that make up human language.
Talk about psycholinguistics, mind has a very important rules in the way
of acquiring the language. Mind could process what we have learned from the
other people and we try to imitate or reinforce that language on our mind. If
we talk about the study of human mind works, it is called psychology. If it
related to the language and what the mind does to process the language, it is
called psycholinguistics. Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how
words are combined to form sentences. Language is about how we produce
something to communicate with others, and it needs a combination words to
make sentence. How we learn to combine words and form it to the sentence is
called syntactic development. So, syntactic development is related to the
psycholinguistics, because the language that we produce on our mind includes
the combination of words and how mind do to combine the words to form a
sentence.
Besides that, if we look at the history of how syntax was localized within
the brain, the IFG is a region of the brain which is found to be the most
important aspect within a syntactic processing neural net. The IFG is
responsible for parsing. It has been postulated that when it comes to syntactic
knowledge, the left anterior brain appears to be involved in this type of

processing. Friederici et al (2003) proposed that when it comes to syntactic

processing there are two systems involved: an automat zed initial process that
is involved in the structure-building process, as well as a second system that
kicks in later for a controlled process of syntactic repair and reanalysis.
C. The Stages of Syntactic Development
By the time children are in their tenth-eleventh months, they have
passed the Cooing and Babbling stages i.e. they can now produce
combinations of vowels and consonants and are capable of using their
vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis. The two main stages of
syntactic development are stages in utterance length and stages in
development of transformations.
1. Stages in utterance length
a. One-word Stage (Holophrastic) i.e. single word utterances (12-18
months)
Between the ages of twelve and eighteen months, babies usually
begin to use words to communicate, beginning with one-word
utterances. Within a few months of uttering their first words, they
move into two word combinations. According to Gleason, these
primitive sentences mostly consist of nouns, verbs and adjectives
with a lack of important grammatical elements. This period is
characterized by speech in single terms which are uttered for
everyday objects such as milk, cookie, cat, cup etc. Also, the
child starts using words to indicate names: mama or doggie;
certain actions or demands: more!, no!
We sometimes use the term Holophrastic (meaning a single
form functioning as a phrase or a sentence) to describe an utterance
that could be analyzed as a word, a phrase or a sentence. While many
of these holophrastic utterances seem to be used to name objects,
they may also be produced in circumstances that suggest the child is
already extending their use. But child utterances dont necessarily
mean what adult utterances mean. Child uses language for social
purposes, trying to convey ideas and feelings.
However, Cattell (2002) states that it isnt until real two-word
utterances

begin we can say that syntactic (grammatical)

constructions have started to form. He adds that until you have two

words to rub together, then, there isnt any syntax because syntax is
about the relationship between words in a sentence. Some linguists
have challenged this notion by claiming that single-word utterances
are really holophrastic sentences; in other words the single word
stands for a sentence.
At about ten months, infants start to utter recognizable words.
Some word-like vocalizations that do not correlate well with words
in the local language may consistently be used by particular infants
to express particular emotional states: one infant is reported to have
used to express pleasure, and another is said to have used to express
"distress or discomfort". For the most part, recognizable words are
used in a context that seems to involve naming: "duck" while the
child hits a toy duck off the edge of the bath; "sweep" while the child
sweeps with a broom; "car" while the child looks out of the living
room window at cars moving on the street below; "papa" when the
child hears the doorbell.
Young children often use words in ways that are too narrow or
too broad: "bottle" used only for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only for
a particular bear; "dog" used for lambs, cats, and cows as well as
dogs; "kick" used for pushing and for wing-flapping as well as for
kicking. These under extensions and overextensions develop and
change over time in an individual child's usage.
b. Two-word stage

i.e. "mini-sentences" with simple semantic

relations (18-20 months)

The two-word stage can begin around eighteen to twenty four
months, depending on when they begin the one word stage. By the
time the child is two years old, a variety of combinations, similar to
baby chair, mommy eat and cat bad will usually have
appeared. The child not only produces speech, but receives feedback
confirming that the utterance worked as a contribution to the
interaction.
Beginning with this Early Multi-Word Stage (EMWS), the child
begins to string words together and to form simple reduced
sentences. The average vocabulary at the beginning of this stage is of
about 50 words and sometimes the child may begin by simply

reproducing rote-learned structures whose meaning they may not

know.
The vast majority of corpora reveal that the child is able to use a
variety of semantic relations during this stage:

agent + action = baby sleep

action + agent = kick ball

action + locative = sit chair (locative means something that

locates an action or entity)

entity + locative = teddy bed
possessor + possession = Mommy book
entity + attribute = block red
demonstrative + entity = this shoe
(OGrady

1997)
New words are assigned to the different word classes. Grammatical
formatives or functional categories seem to be either absent or rarely used. For
example,

in

English,

children

omit

determiners,

auxiliaries

and

complementizers:
baby [is] talking
Mummy [has] thrown it
[the] bunny [has] broken
want [to] go out
In English, yes-no questions are often signaled only by intonation at
EMWS:
a. Fraser water?
b. No eat?
Wh- questions at EMWS are illustrated below:
a. Where Kitty?
b. What this?
c. Who that?
Note that at this stage, the grammar is not the same as the adult
grammar. However, even though the word order isn't the same as the adult
grammar, it is relatively consistent. And they control their intonation patterns
more. The grammar may be simple at this point, but it still looks like grammar
and not like chaos.

Pivot Grammar
In psychology, pivot grammar refers to the structure behind two word
phrases often used by children. Pivot grammar is a part of Stage two language
developments which occurs around the age of 18 months and continues to
when the child reaches two years of age. After this the child enters Stage three
language developments as he/she learns more words and a more accepted
structure of sentences rather than two word utterances.

Martin Braines (1963) analysis of language in infants suggests that the

two-word utterances spoken by a child are not entirely based upon the random
juxtaposition of words. Children have simple rules they use to generate twoword utterances. Braine suggests that infants frequently distinguish between
two separate word classes the pivot (P) and the open (X) class of words.
Each pair of words selects one from a small set of wordscalled pivots
that occur in many utterances. The pivot class consists of words that occur
frequently and in fixed positions (at the end or the beginning of the
enunciation). While these pivot words tend to vary between different children,
they are often pronouns, such as it, that or my, prepositions such as
off or up, and certain verbs and adjectives, such as do, pretty and
see. By contrast, Braine identified the X-class of words, later described as
open class, which occur in different positions and also occur with much
greater frequency in one-word utterances. He hypothesized that early twoword combinations were comprised of either a type one pivot (which occurs at
the beginning of an utterance) followed by an open class word, or an open
class word followed by a type two pivot (which occurs at the end of an
utterance).
For example, Allgone is a first-position pivot: allgone egg, allgone
shoe, but not shoe allgone. A second-position pivot off: shirt off, water off,
etc. more is a common first-position pivot. Some examples are: more cereal,
more fish, more walk.
Braine posits that this rule could be one of the fundamental internal
rules of grammar.
Limitations
Pivot words do occur in isolation, pivots occur in combination with one
another, sentences longer than two-words are fairly common in I, and there is
distributional evidence which indicates that more than two word-classes exist
(Brown, 1973, p. 110). The rules simply do not fit the evidence. Brown and his
colleagues noted that adults expand childrens utterances. If one assumes
that adult expansions are generally accurate interpretations of the childs
utterance,

then

pivot-open

grammars

underestimate the childs knowledge.

are

inadequate

because

they

For example, Lois Bloom showed that when one attended to context the
utterance mommy sock used by her child in two different ways. The first
could be glossed as Its mommys sock, while the second could be glossed
Mommy is putting on your sock. A pivot-open grammar would not be able
to distinguish these two.
c.Telegraphic Stage (24-30 months)
This stage occurs between twenty four to thirty months and is named as
it is because it is similar to what is seen in a telegram; containing just enough
information for the sentence to make sense. This stage contains many three
and four word sentences. Sometime during this stage the child begins to see
the links between words and objects and therefore overgeneralization comes
in. Some examples of sentences in the telegraphic stage are Mummy eat
carrot, What her name? and He is playing ball.
Phrases may be more than two words in this stage; however, they
should still sound very incomplete and choppy. This choppiness is actually
how the phase was labeled telegraphic. It is based off of the telegraph machine
that sent messages in short phrases because people paid per word.
At this stage, some of the children's utterances are grammatically
correct like:

'Amy likes tea' - (Subject + Verb + Object)

'Teddy looks tired' - (Subject + Verb + Adjective)

'Mummy sleeps upstairs' - (Subject + Verb + Adverbial)

Whilst others have grammatical elements missing

'This shoe all wet' - (the verb carrying meaning is missing: is)

Cat no play (the verb doesnt is missing)

Children are more likely to retain CONTENT words (nouns, verbs and
adjectives that refer to real things) and FUNCTION words (that have
grammatical function: pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs) are often
omitted.
Overgeneralizations are also found at telegraphic stage. This is when
children make virtuous errors in their allocation of inflections.
Also a childs vocabulary expands from 50 words to up to 13,000
words. At the end of this stage the child starts to incorporate plurals, joining
words and attempts to get a grip on tenses. Once the child enters the
telegraphic stage, further development is very rapid.
2.

Stages in development of transformations

d. Stage Four (36-42 months)

Bowen states that stage 4 includes the acquisition of irregular past
tense words, such as "fell", followed by adding "s" to possessives, then
proper use of "to be" verbs, such as "are" vs. "is." This stage usually
occurs between 36 and 42 months.
e. Stage Five (40-46 months)
Stage 5 which comes between 40 and 46 months, includes
understanding of articles, the regular past tense (adding -ed) and third
person regular present tense, such as "He laughs". Toddlers usually apply
general rules to all words before learning irregularities. For example, a
toddler will often say "goed" or "foots" before he says, "went" or "feet."
But this shows understanding of the rules; it's another automatically
learned phenomenon.
f. Stage Six (42-52 months i.e. around age 4)
From 42 months on, children reach Stage V, which includes using
contractions, such as "I'm" and "you're." They use third person irregular
present tense, such as "she has," and more complicated uses of "to be"
verbs, such as combining them with other verbs and forming contractions
with them. According to Bowen, kids have usually mastered all of these
stages by 52 months and should be able to form four to five word
sentences around age 4.
The final stage of language development brings a child's
utterances closer to adult language standards. Sub-patterns in this stage
include the acquisition of negatives, questions and other sentence elements
such as linking verbs, regular and irregular past tenses and compound and
complex sentence forms. Acquisition of adult language patterns is
generally complete between the ages of 8 and 10.
D. Factors Affecting Syntactic Development
According to Dr Joseph Kess (1993), no child fails to learn a native
language, and it is learned largely before the age of 5. Although babies learn how
to speak at different rates, almost all little ones learn how to form words and
sentences in a similar order, beginning with single syllables and graduating to
more complex ideas like tense. In just a few short years, a child goes from no
language at all to forming cohesive sentences following grammatical rules. This

process is about syntactic development. Actually the acquisition of language

itself is influenced by the biological factors including their physical development,
cognitive factors and environmental factor, but here there are some other factors
that affect the childrens language development especially in the syntactic rules.
We usually find some children are in the different stage of syntactic development,
some could combine words and form sentence quickly, but some could not
produce the language and combine the words to make the sentence easily. The
following factors are the possible causes that affect childrens syntactic
development.
1. Health Condition: Healthy children learn to talk faster than children who
are less healthy or sick often. This is because the development aspects of
motor and mental aspects of speech better thus more ready to learn to
speak. The motivation of speaking is driven by the desire to become
members of social groups and communicate with members of the group.
2. Intelligence: Children, who have high intelligence, will learn to speak
faster and have a better command of the language than children whose
low intelligence level. Learning a language closely related to the ability
to think. Language expresses what people think of children.
3. Gender: Girls are better in learning languages than boys, both in
pronunciation, vocabulary, and the level of frequency of language, rather
than boys. So, it could be the cause why we often find the girls are more
talk active that the boys.
4. Family: The number of family member, birth order, and method of
speaking practice are some factors influencing childrens syntactic
development. The more the number of family members, the more often
children hear and speak. Similarly, the first child will be better in their
speech development when their parents have more time to engage and
train them to speak.
5. The desire and urge to communicate and relationships with peers. The
stronger the desire and urge to communicate with others, especially
playing with peers, the more powerful it child's efforts to speak or
speaking.
6. Personality: Children who can adjust well tend to have the ability to
speak or speak better than children who have problems or obstacles in
the adjustment and social. Language skills children who have personality
and a good adjustment will also be better in terms of quantity (number of

words and frequency of speech) as well as the quality (accuracy of

pronunciation and content / topic).

E.

Measure related to the Syntactic Development

1. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)
MLU is a measure of linguistic productivity in children, but related to
the syntax, it also can be said as a measure of syntactic development of the
children, because it measure how increase the children language development
from one word, two word and then form a sentence until a complex sentence.
According to Brown (in ardjowidjojo, 2010: 241) the way of calculating
MLU can be done in several steps:
1. Take a sample of 100 utterances.
2. Count the number of morpheme.
3. Divide the sum by the number morpheme utterance as in the following
formula.
Morpheme
MLU = Utterance
After that, look at the child is in what stages. Brown (in Owens, 2008)
divides the stage MLU child language acquisition by children into ten stages,
namely:
1. Stage I MLU (1-1.5) at the age of 12-22 months
2. Stage II MLU (1.5-2.0) at the age of 27-28 months
3. Stage III MLU (2.0 to 2.25) at age 27-28 months
4. Stage IV MLU (2.25 to 2.5) at the age of 28-30 months
5. Stage V MLU (2.5 to 2.75) at age 31-32 months
6. Stage VI MLU (2.75 to 30.0) in the usual 33-34 years
7. Stage VII MLU (3.0 to 3.5) in after 35-39 months
8. Stage VIII MLU (3.5 to 3.45) at age 38-40 months
9. Stage IX MLU (3.5 to 3.45) at age 41-46 first
10. Stage X MLU (45+) at the age +47 months
Look at the following study case:
Anne is a child in the ages of 3 years 10 months. Based on the
observation to their language in conversation in amount of 100 utterances, the
data results can be seen as following table:
The number of word in one
utterance
Utterance with one word
Utterance with two words
Utterance with three words

The number of
utterance

The number of
morpheme

26

26

25

50

28

84

Utterance with four words

Utterance with five words
Total

14

56

35

100

251

So, we can see the following measure of Mean Length of Utterances:

MLU =

Morpheme
Utterance

251
100

= 2.51

Anne's MLU is 2, 51 which means that it is at the stage of V. It means

she is at a low stage. Actually, Anne (3years10months) should be at the stage
of VIII (the MLU is 3.5 to 3.45).

In conclusion, the development of

syntactical Anne is rather slow.

2.

Index of Productivity Syntax (IPSyn)

The index of productive syntax (IPSyn; Scarborough (Applied
Psycholinguistics 11:1-22, 1990) is a measure of syntactic development in
child language that has been used in research and clinical settings to
investigate the grammatical development of various groups of children.
IPSyn was designed for investigating individual differences in child language
acquisition. However, IPSyn is mostly calculated manually, which is an
extremely laborious process.

Calculating IPSyn scores manually is a

laborious process that involves identifying 56 syntactic structures (or their

absence) in a transcript of 100 child utterances. Currently, researchers work
with a partially automated process by using transcripts in electronic format
and spreadsheets. However, the actual identification of syntactic structures,
which accounts for most of the time spent on calculating IPSyn scores, still
has to be done manually. By using part-of-speech and morphological analysis
tools, it is possible to narrow down the number of sentences where certain
structures may be found. The search for such sentences involves patterns of
words and parts-of-speech (POS). Some structures, such as the presence of
determiner-noun or determiner-adjective-noun sequences, can be easily
identified through the use of simple patterns. Other structures, such as front
or center-embedded clauses, pose a greater challenge. Not only are patterns

for such structures difficult to craft, they are also usually inaccurate. Patterns
that are too general result in too many sentences to be manually examined,
but more restrictive patterns may miss sentences where the structures are
present, making their identification highly unlikely. Without more syntactic
analysis, automatic searching for structures in IPSyn is limited, and
computation of IPSyn scores still requires a great deal of manual inspection.
F.

The disorders of syntactic development in childrens language development

Some children could not easily to produce the language in forming sentence
from the combination of the words or may have some disorders. Some factors
above could be the causes, but the following disorders are also found in the
syntactic development on childrens language development:
1. Disfasia is disorder of language development that is not accordance with the
development of childrens ability should be. Suspected these disorders arise
because of abnormalities in speech center in the brain. Children with this
disorder at the first year old could not pronounce the word spontaneous
meaningful, for example mama or papa. Receptive speech (understand the
speech of others) is good but expressive speech (delivered an intent) has been
delayed. Because speech organs and organs eat are same, then these children
usually have problems with eating or sucking milk from a bottle.
2. Childhood Disintegrative Disorder/CDD: At the first until second years old,
children grow and develop normally and then children lost the ability that
they have learned well. Children develop normally in the first 2 years as
communication skills, social, play and behavior. However, the ability was
disrupted before 10 years old, It disrupted which are the language ability,
social and motor skills.
3. Asperger Syndrome : The typical symptoms that arise are disruption of social
interaction, limitations symptoms, repetition of behavior, conflict of interests,
and activities. Children with this disorder have a qualitative disorder in social
interaction. Characterized by impaired use of some nonverbal communication
(eye, view, facial expressions, posture), they cannot play with children her
own age, lack of control of social relationships and emotional.

4. Multisystem Development Disorder (MSDD): MSDD described with the

characteristics experiencing communication problems, social, and sensory
processes (processes sensory stimuli reception). Characteristics that clearly
is an abnormal reaction, it can be less sensitive or hypersensitive to sound,
aroma, texture, movement, temperature, and sensations of other sensory. It is
difficult to participate in activities well, but its not because of interest, the
interest to communicate and interactions remain normal but it does not react
in interaction optimally. There are problems related with the regularity of
sleep, appetite, and other routine activities.

CHAPTER III
CLOSING

A. Conclusion
Syntactic Development is about the process or the way children learn the
rules of combining words to form a sentence, they try to produce the
language from the simple form to be the more complex form. It is much
related to the psycholinguistics because psycholinguistics is about what our

minddo to produce the language, ant it is about the study of the psychological
and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and
understand language. The stages of syntactic development of the children are
start from the one-word stage when they only produce one word in a very
simple form and then next to the two-word stage, telegraphic stage, stage
four, stage five until stage six when the child is around 4 years old. The
affecting factors of this development are health condition, intelligence,
gender, family, desire and the personality. Measure that related to the
syntactic development is Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and IPSyn (Index
of Productivity Syntax). Some disorders of childrens language development
are Disfasia, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, Asperger Syndrome, and
Multisystem Development Disorder. Those are which may be the cause of the
delayed syntactic development of the children.
B. Suggestion
Childrens age is a productivity age to acquire language, because at that
age, they tried to adapt with the humans life and try to produce what they
have heard from their parents or people around them. We as the people
around them have to support and help them to acquire the language better, as
much as possible, as can as possible, we should have a role to help them in
developing their syntactic development. We could try to do the
communication with them with the right rules of syntax and make a better
communication with them.

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