Stages of Morphosyntactic Development in Young Children’s Language
Source: Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall
Topics: Early Years (Birth-5), Speech and Language Development, Language (Ages 2-3), Language (Ages 3-5)
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. |
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| II | 27–30 | The appearance of grammatical morphemes. |
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| 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). |
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| 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). |
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| V | 41–46 | The appearance of sentences conjoined with conjunction words (and, if, because, when, but, after, before, so). |
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Excerpted From:
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.
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