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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The effects of training on the grammar of preschool children

subject

description

The acquisition of morphological and syntactic rules of language during early childhood has been the object of intensive study in many languages during the last few years. As regards English, some surveys have already been published on the results (McNeill, 1970; Slobin, 1971). Research on the acquisition of morphological and syntactic patterns has been influenced on the one hand by psycholinguistics, on the other by the psychology of learning. This duality of starting points manifests itself also in the way of presenting problems and in the interpretation of results. One of the methodological difficulties when studying the acquisition of grammar was for a long time how to separate those language productions where the child imitates what he has heard from those which he creates himself, and where the verbal stimulus environment of the child cannot be known. Attempts have been made to solve this problem by investigating errors which children have made in their speech. Such a study, however, is slow, and besides, it does not make possible a systematic variation of stimulus material. Only when Berko (1958) in her study on the morphological patterns in English used, in the questions presented to children, artificial words (or words no longer in current use) which, however, followed the phonemic patterns of English, was the possibility of varying the stimuli methodologically established. This property of the method has not, in my