A first language : the early stages / [by] Roger Brown.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brown, Roger, 1925-1997.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Children--Language.

Children.

Language acquisition.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (460 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1973.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

For many years, Roger Brown and his colleagues have studied the developing language of pre-school children--the language that ultimately will permit them to understand themselves and the world around them. This longitudinal research project records the conversational performances of three children, studying both semantic and grammatical aspects of their language development.These core findings are related to recent work in psychology and linguistics--and especially to studies of the acquisition of languages other than English, including Finnish, German, Korean, and Samoan. Roger Brown has written the most exhaustive and searching analysis yet undertaken of the early stages of grammatical constructions and the meanings they convey.The five stages of linguistic development Brown establishes are measured not by chronological age-since children vary greatly in the speed at which their speech develops--but by mean length of utterance. This volume treats the first two stages.Stage I is the threshold of syntax, when children begin to combine words to make sentences. These sentences, Brown shows, are always limited to the same small set of semantic relations: nomination, recurrence, disappearance, attribution, possession, agency, and a few others.Stage II is concerned with the modulations of basic structural meanings--modulations for number, time, aspect, specificity--through the gradual acquisition of grammatical morphemes such as inflections, prepositions, articles, and case markers. Fourteen morphemes are studied in depth and it is shown that the order of their acquisition is almost identical across children and is predicted by their relative semantic and grammatical complexity.It is, ultimately, the intent of this work to focus on the nature and development of knowledge: knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar; knowledge inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences.

Contents:

Intro

Preface

Contents

An Unbuttoned Introduction

Five Aspects of Sentence Construction

Relations or Roles within the Simple Sentence

Modulations of Meaning within the Simple Sentence

Modalities of the Simple Sentence

Embedding of One Sentence within Another

Coordination of Simple Sentences and Propositional Relations

Linguistic Apes

Washoe's Accomplishments

Sarah's Accomplishments

The Study of Adam, Eve, and Sarah

The Expository Plan of this Work

Stage I. Semantic Roles and Grammatical Relations

The Available Data

Characterizations of the Data

Telegraphic Speech

Pivot and Open Classes

Concepts and Relations

Grammatical Relations, Predication, and Topic-Comment

Case Grammar

Conclusions

The Role of Word Order

The Period of Single-Word Utterances

Word Order in Spontaneous Speech

Discriminating Response to Contrastive Word Orders

Word Order Judgments and Corrections

Word Sequencing in Aphasics

The Major Meanings at Stage I

Causes of the "Pivot Look"

Prevalent Relations and Development in Stage I

Definitions and Fragmentary Data

Sensorimotor Intelligence and the Meanings of Stage I

A Grammar for Late Stage I English

Facts to be Represented

Examples of Detail that will not be Represented

A Schlesinger-type Grammar

A Case Grammar

A Bloom-type Grammar

Summary of Grammar Types

In General Summary

Stage II. Grammatical Morphemes and the Modulation of Meanings

The Order of Acquisition

The Morphemes Scored

Grammatical Morphemes Not Scored

Acquisition Order in Other Studies of Spontaneous Speech

Acquisition Order in Controlled Studies

Acquisition Order for Grammatical Morphemes in Languages Other Than English

The Grammar of the Fourteen Morphemes

The Progressive.

The Prepositions in and on

Plural and Singular Number

Past Tense

The Possessive

The Copula

Articles

The Semantics of the Fourteen Morphemes

The Progressive

The Prepositions in and on

The Third Person

The Frequency of the Fourteen Morphemes in Parental Speech

Determinants of the Order of Acquisition

Frequency

Semantic Complexity

Grammatical Complexity

The Problem of Variability

The Problem of Segmentation

Summary

References

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliography and index.

ISBN:

0-674-02892-9

OCLC:

466121472