Language Development in Early Childhood

All 6 Terms & Definitions

Grammatical Morphemes

Small units of meaning — inflections, prepositions, articles — attached to words or added between words. Roger Brown documented 14 English grammatical morphemes that are acquired in a consistent order across children: the order correlates with semantic and grammatical complexity, not input frequency.

Overgeneralisation

The application of a grammatical rule to forms that are exceptions — producing "goed," "mouses," "foots," or "breaked." Overgeneralisation errors are evidence that children have extracted an abstract rule and apply it productively. They peak in the preschool years and are absent in children who acquire only by rote imitation — making them one of the clearest pieces of evidence against pure imitation accounts of language learning.

Syntactic Development

The acquisition of rules governing sentence structure: word order, clause embedding, relative clauses, passives. In early childhood, children master basic SVO order and then progressively acquire more complex structures. English passives (e.g., "the cat was chased by the dog") are late acquisitions, typically not fully understood until age 5–7.

Narrative Competence

The ability to produce a structured, coherent account of a temporally and causally organised sequence of events. Develops substantially from 3 to 6 years: early narratives are simple sequences ("and then... and then...") while later narratives include a classic story grammar structure. Closely linked to theory of mind and is a strong predictor of reading comprehension.

Wh-Questions

Questions beginning with "who," "what," "where," "when," "why," and "how" require subject-auxiliary inversion and other syntactic operations. Children acquire "what" and "where" questions first, followed by "who," "when," "how," and "why" in a consistent cross-linguistic order that reflects the cognitive complexity of the question type rather than input frequency.

Private Speech

Audible self-directed speech produced while working on tasks. Vygotsky argued that private speech is not egocentric immaturity but the internalisation of social language as a cognitive self-regulation tool. Peaks in the preschool years at intermediate task difficulty and progressively internalises into silent inner speech. Closely related to working memory and executive function development.