Words index  Vivian Cook

Children’s Early 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?  

  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.  

 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