9 Summary of Session 5

In this session you looked at an incredibly subtle and intricate part of language called grammar. There are as many grammars as there are languages and we still don’t have a complete understanding of how children learn all this variation and complexity. We know they start out with mini sentences that combine two and three words together and they learn how to generalise grammatical patterns from their experience. More complex sentences are built from blending together simpler elements, and early speech can take on a telegraphic style. Children are learning the grammatical rules for gluing parts of words together (morphology) as well as those that create the bigger meaningful sequences (word order). Eventually slot and frames patterns are used to generate more complex grammatical structures with multiple clauses.

In language development the course does not always run smooth: it can sometimes be a case of three steps forward and one step back. Perhaps this is not surprising given the complexity of what children are trying to learn.

In the next session you’ll take a deeper look at the shape of this development, some of the errors children occasionally make along the way, what this normal part of development reveals about the learning processes, and how children overcome these errors to go on to master their language.

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