Children's Two Word Combinations

Children’s Two Word Combinations

One of the first discoveries about children’s language was that when they start putting words together they seem to use rules all of their own. Here are some of the two-word combinations produced by a boy called Andrew between 19 and 23 months. Can you see any rules to this?

all broke	more car	airplane by
all buttoned	more fish	siren by
all clean	more high
all done	more hot	no bed
all dressed	more read	no down
all fix	more sing	no fix
all messy	more walk	no pee
all through		no wet
all shut	see baby
all wet	see pretty	mail come
all gone	see train	mama come

The explanation that Martin Braine came up with was that Andrew had two types of words in his speech. One type could occur freely on its own, like walk, called an open word. The other could not occur on its own but had to be accompanied by an open word, more, called a pivot word. The child always combines these two types together; some pivots occur first no down, some second, airplane by. The result may be something that an adult would never say but that is perfectly logical in the child’s own terms: no wet, more high, see pretty, siren by.

Of course not all of the children’s sentences fit these rules. Here are some other sentences from Andrew that go outside his own rules.

airplane all gone	what’s that	pants change
all done milk	mail man	dry pants
byebye back	our car	up on there some more
papa byebye	our door	off bib

While this pivot grammar works quite well, later researchers have turned to more complicated analyses, partly to capture how the child uses the sentence rather than just its word combination; more car for example might be a request to hand over another model car, more hot a request to turn the heating up.

Source: Braine, 1963

How do children learn words? Children's Early Words Words in the UK National Curriculum BabyTalk words

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