Stages of Morphosyntactic Development in Young Children’s Language

Stages of Morphosyntactic Development in Young Children’s Language

photo by: ellievanhoutte

By S.A. Raver

Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall

In the table below find an outline of five stages of morphosyntactical development in preschooler's language. This table shows morphosyntactic characteristics with associated examples from 12 months of age to 46 months of age.

Stage	Age (months)	Morphosyntactic Characteristics	Examples
I	12–26	Single-word utterances and multiword combinations based on word-order/ semantic-syntactic rules.	“Eat cookie” (action + object) “Daddy shoe” (possessor + possession) “Doggie bed” (entity + locative)
II	27–30	The appearance of grammatical morphemes.	“Mommy driving” (present progressive-ing) “I love dogs” (regular plural –s)
III	31–34	Simple sentence forms Development of noun and verb phrases with the addition of grammatical morphemes, quantifiers, adjectives, and adverbs. Development of different sentence types (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and negative).	“Dave eats banana” (subject–verb–object) “Mommy’s car” (possessive nouns) “Diana has three cats” (quantifiers) “She has a blue cap” (adjectives) “She runs quickly” (adverbs) “I’m eating ice cream” (declarative) “What are you eating?” (interrogative) “Throw me the ball, please” (imperative) “I don’t want that” (negative)
IV	35–40	The appearance of embedded phrases and subordinate clauses within a sentence. Subordinate clauses are introduced by conjunction words (after, although, before, until, while, when) or relative pronouns (who, which, whom, that).	“The woman in the blue dress is my teacher” (embedded phrase) “The boy we met last week is in my class” (embedded clause)
V	41–46	The appearance of sentences conjoined with conjunction words (and, if, because, when, but, after, before, so).	“I play the violin and she plays the piano” “She cried because she fell down the stairs” “We went to school after we ate breakfast” “I like fruit but I don’t like vegetables”

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Early Childhood Special Education - 0 to 8 Years: Strategies for Positive Outcomes
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Excerpt from Early Childhood Special Education - 0 to 8 Years: Strategies for Positive Outcomes, by S.A. Raver, 2009 edition, p. 127.

© ______ 2009, Merrill, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The reproduction, duplication, or distribution of this material by any means including but not limited to email and blogs is strictly prohibited without the explicit permission of the publisher.

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