Grammatical Development

Grammar encompasses syntax and morphology. Learning syntax entails working out how a language organizes words into the combinations that are called phrases and sentences. Mastering morphology requires children to recognize and produce different forms of nouns created by inflections such as the –s that signals plural in English, and the variety of verb forms created by inflections signaling tense, for example, –ed for past.

Noun and verb morphology is essentially under children’s control by the time they enter school. Word combinations can be heard not long after a child’s first birthday, and the length of a child’s sentences increases continuously over the preschool period. Most syntactic constructions available in the [Page 826]language have been produced by the time a child enters school. But progress up to this point is variable across children. And this structural knowledge requires an extended period of consolidation during the early school years, not least via the emergence of literacy. This entry briefly reviews the course of development in selected grammatical features, documents variability in grammatical development across children, and considers factors extrinsic and intrinsic to the child that may influence individual trajectories of development. The details of grammatical development that are considered here relate primarily to monolingual speakers of English, but it is worth remembering that many children around the world grow up learning more than one language from birth. (Sketches of grammatical development in 21 typologically varied languages other than English can be found in Ball et al. and Fletcher et al. in the Further Readings.)