Session 5: Putting words together

Introduction

As children start to put words together into multi-word utterances, they are presented with a fresh challenge. Knowing what each individual word means is not enough – they need to learn how meaning emerges from the combination of words. The difference in meaning between ‘dog bites man’ and ‘man bites dog’ does not lie in the words themselves, but in the who-does-what-to whom, the subject, the verb and the object. Word order is part of a wider system of conventions on how to assemble smaller parts of speech into bigger units of meaning or what we call a grammar. Children, however, do not hear adults use abstract grammatical categories like subject, verb and object. Instead, they hear adults speaking and see them gesturing. So, children need to reconstruct abstract grammatical knowledge from their experience with language, if they are to unlock its expressive power. In this session you’ll explore the basics of how children do this.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• describe the transition from two- to three-word sentences
• understand how children form patterns across words
• explain how online databases of speech can help our understanding
• consider how complex grammar emerges from simpler language.