How Do Babies Build Sentences? The Stages of Child Syntax

What kinds of sentences do we hear from babies and toddlers? How much grammar can we find in their language use? In this week's episode, we take a look at child syntactic stages: what characteristics kids display as they progress from one to two to many words, whether their grammars are similar to those of adults, and how their linguistic interpretation may tell us more than just their speech.
This is Topic #85!
This week's tag language: Maltese!
Related videos:
The Youngest Experiments: Testing Language in Babies - • How to Test Language i...
Last episode:
Just in Case: The Syntax of Case - • How Can We Tell What R...
Other of our language acquisition videos:
Conservative Babies: Why Kids Don't Speak Until They Know - • How Do Kids Avoid Sayi...
Flipping Switches: Changing Your Grammar for a Second Language - • How Much Can We Adjust...
Kids Be Frontin': Child Phonological Mistakes - • Why Do Little Kids Mak...
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[@12tone]

That ball experiment is absolutely fascinating. Such a clever way to tease out understanding when you can't just, like, ask them directly.

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, that one is quite cool, really. Experiments in linguistics get easier in some ways once people are old enough to get them to just tell you things about their language. Of course, then they can overthink things and try to game your experiment, etc., so it's got its plusses and minuses. But linguists have had to be clever to work with kids this size! We've done a couple of videos in the past just looking at the available experimental techniques, if you're curious. ^_^

[@impCaesarAvg]

Maybe the kids thought the researcher was saying, "The second, green, ball."

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, that's probably what is going on; it really doesn't seem like it's that they just don't have the syntax. There's a bunch of research with kids (and with adults, to an extent) that shows that they process stuff as it goes along, and they have a harder time recovering from mistaken interpretations to achieve the right ones. If you're already looking at the second ball, when green comes up, you could just be like "well, it's green, so that's fine", rather than reinterpreting. There's a prosody that could suggest that "green" is sort of a parenthetical statement, but I find pretty unnatural to say it that way, personally. But for a kid, it's easy to picture how they might end up there.

[@ProfessorPolitics]

I just finished Pinker's Words and Rules so stumbling on this video was an awesome way to dig into adolescent language acquisition. Awesome job!

[@xopowo1979]

This is a very interesting topic, since I make linguistic researches on Chinese and sign languages: I was thinking about the lack of functional categories in sign languages (vis-à-vis spoken languages)... when talking about the tree drawing, are these functional categories viewed as empty categories in deaf children minds? ( like absence of indefinite plural article Det in English)???

[@deljfinaandoni1684]

You are amazing Moti! Thank you for your time and efforts. I really enjoy this channel.

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! Glad you like it. It's very meaningful to hear these things. ^_^

[@robert_wigh]

Thank you very much for making this video, Moti Liberman! Interesting topic. Are there other stages than just this one? Are there later stages? When do children start to build more complex sentences, like ’I want to cut the leave over there, lying flat on the ground, in two’? Also, a flaw in the experiments maybe was that they were conducted using English speaking children, right? Well, that might be a problem, because English is a relatively simple language with simple verb conjugation, no cases and forming compounds really easy. If the child, who said ’doggie bath’, meant ’a bath for dogs’ and were Russian, he/she would have said "собачая ванна" (sobachaja vanna). If he/she meant that the dog in in the bath, then the child sound have said "собака в ванне" (sobaka v vanne), using the prepositional case. If the child spoke Ukrainian, where they have the vocative case, he/she would have said "мамо!" when calling for his/her mum, and "маме", the dative case, when giving something to his/her mum, saying ’to mum’. Or can’t children use cases at this very young age? I can see how that would be a problem for Russian parents, but more so for Estonian or Hungarian parents...Estonian has 15 cases, and Hungarian has 18...How would a Hungarian child be able to communicate anything without cases? O_o

[@brain_segfault]

What is the name of the (corrected) 6 ball study on child hierarchical syntax?

[@mymusic7569]

It's a shame the link to additional resources is not redirecting to any content on the webpage, and that sources were not listed on the video descriptions.

[@J0LLYJ3LL0]

Nice yoi references

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! We want to work in being born to make history, but it didn't fit with what we were talking about, so. ^_^

[@thefinesofthetime2]

0:49 I know a 1 year old who can form such sophisticated sentences. His name is Steward Griffin.

[@beethovenjunkie]

This was a really interesting video! One thing, though: At every stage of my linguistic education (granted, I'm still a student and "only" studying to become a German teacher and not a full fledged linguist), I was always told or I always read that there isn't really evidence that "speech is special". Yes, children's processing power can mask their true abilities but this doesn't mean that they somehow have a "speech module" in their brain. I think there are other ways to explain how children develop speech that also match the evidence (for example the phases you talk about in your video) and only need to use the learning processes we already know about in other contexts. Does that make sense?

[@gnomee9447]

I don't know. I find it weird to think that children have a full understanding of grammar.Of course they often "know more" than they say. I like to think of it in terms of their neural network. They formed weak connections between words and meaning and later also weak connections between words and their order. When mastering their tongue muscles, they learn that each word is hard to get across, so the brain prioritizes the strongest connections, i.e. those with the most repetition and positive feedback. Yet I think biologically, they have more of an "idea" of grammar than understanding. As talking starts, it's a trial and error process, biased by their accumulated knowledge.

[@Gimbar83]

Great video! You really know your pedagogics!

[@thelingspace]

Thanks! Glad you liked it. ^_^

[@harry_j_taylor]

Love your videos!!

[@zioscozio]

What if they put 2 red balls, then 2 green balls. Which ball would a kid pick?

[@HOUROFPOW3R]

I picked the wrong ball too..

[@NappingWanderer]

same (._.)

[@aissamelidrissi8184]

could you talk about English for specific purposes Thank you .

[@thelingspace]

I'm not really sure I know what you mean by this!

[@yoshdrot]

The volume on the video ‫ is a bit lowBut the content is interesting.