1. Introduction
Communication development is a very
important part of the human development. As the child grows older, s/he
develops the ability to communicate. Verbal communication (represented by
language), represents a major part of communication development. Language is a
communication system used to share information with others (including ourselves
as we do when we think in language1
others may define language as a shared system of verbal symbols and rules that
allow us to represent concepts and experiences to communicate with others2.
Language is composed of five components.
Phonology which concerned with speech sounds, morphology which is concerned
with meaningful units, semantics or meanings, pragmatics or language use and
finally the syntax which is mainly considered with grammar and sentence
formation2. Syntax involves word
order rules, rules for combining word into phrases and rules for creating
different types of sentences, such as questions and passive sentences2. Syntax also considers the sentences from
the perspective of their structures and functions3
which will be our concern in this study.
3Have
revised how sentences are structured and what their function could be.
From the structure perspective,
sentences could be divided into four structures, simple, compound. Complex and
compound-complex. Simple sentence is the one that does not compose of (a clause
with a syntactic function) in its components e.g. (a new car). A compound
sentence Is the one that is formed by two simple sentences with a coordinator
between them (and-or-but) e.g. (this is the room and this is the computer). Complex
sentence is the one that have main clause and a subordinate clause with a
syntactic function e.g. (I love this show because it is amazing). The last
structure is the compound-complex sentence which has two sentences compounded
by a coordinator and at least on of them is a complex sentence e.g. (the man
said that he will go to Riyadh because his father is sick).
Sentences' functions are illustrated as declarative
(it is snowing), interrogative (do you like ice cream?), imperative (go home),
exclamatory (what a big lion).
2. Literature Review
Learning the grammatical structure of
language is a remarkable achievement in child language development that is not
less important than learning the vocabulary. By 18-20 months of age, normal
child is capable of producing his/her first two-word utterances. When the child
is three years old, on average s/he capable of producing three-to-four-word
utterances and as the child grows, the grammar grows too, ever increasing in
the debth of sentence complexity and the breadth of its variety4,5.
According to Brown6, children's syntactic development will
pass through five stages of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) development. The
first stage (holophrastic), in which the child is using on word to express his
needs and the second stage (joining stage), in which the child is joining two
words together to communicate and this could be the start point of simple
sentence appearance. By the age of three years, browns stated, that the
children will be somewhere between stage 3(combining stage) and stage 4 (the recursive
stage) and this is due to the individual differences between children. So,
according to him, children at this age will begin to master word order at stage
3 and at the fourth stage the child will develop his/her first complex sentence
that is the sentence with more than one clause. Stated that first complex
sentence is produced by expanding the grammatical object as in [I see [you sit
down]] and expanding the grammatical subject will come later [[what you said]
was bad]. Also, at that stage will rapidly learn grammatical morphemes,
including conjunctions. So, at stage 4 the coordination of sentences (compound
sentences) appears more frequently. Therefore, the child will be capable of
coordinating words, phrases and clauses e.g. (gimme candy and chocolate and I
give you kiss).
Other studies implies that children display
the ability to produce complex sentences structures before their 3rd
birthday7 and according to this,
we expect to see various kinds of sentence structures (simple, compound and
complex) in this study8, claims
that children will not acquire all
syntactic rules of their native language even at their 9 years of age.
In Arabic9
have provided a very interesting study about their two children's (Marwan and
Dima) language development. They included in the study that the mastry of two-word
utterances (beginning of simple sentences) were at the age 20-21 months. By the
age of 2:1 year, their children started to produce compound sentences. Complex
sentences appeared by the age of 2:6 years. 10Stated
that children at the ages (3-4) years of age were using simple sentences in 54%
of their speech and as children grow up, complex sentences are taking place
until it reaches 45% of children's speech at the age (5-6) years. She also
stated that children's ability to acquire language structure both in quantity and
quality is not influenced by the socio-economic status of their parents.
Regarding the sentence function, 11Found that children at Brown's stage 2,
which may extend according to Brown even to the third birthday, from six
languages expressed similar kinds of meanings. Utterances were used to locate
or name objects and people, to request, to negate or indicate refusal or
rejection, to express situations or events, to describe and finally to question
with both wh-questions and yes/no questions. Therefore, in our study, if Arabic
is the same with English, we will expect to see these kinds of functions in our
sample of children between 3 and 4 years of age.
Halliday provided seven functions in his
son Nigel's earliest language from other perspective as following,
instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative and
informative12.
In Arabic Abdo & Abdo showed that by
the age of 2:7 months, their children have produced declarative, imperative,
interrogative and negations in their sentences9.
3. Methodology
3.1. Subjects
The subjects participated in this study
were (20) children (10) males (10) females aged from (3) to (4) Years old ( see
appendix 1 for exact age for each child) from different kindergartens in Amman
and its suburbs ( ten were recoded by our group and the other left ten were
recorded by another group of master students from Jordanian university|) .These
children, according to their caregivers, were normal clever and do not have any
significant health problems or problems with socializing and interacting with
their peers in the kindergartens, also they belong to different classes of
society. Children with language abnormalities or bilingualism did not
participate in this study.
3.2. Stimuli
Samples were collected through playing
and direct interaction between Children and
examiners. Toys from the university center like (fire engine, wooden blocks,
small cars and small characters), in addition for toys from the kindergartens
themselves were used to elicit children's responses. Samples for non
cooperative children were dismissed.
4. Procedures and Analysis
Data was collected using three kinds of
recorders an MP3, Cassette recorder and an (I Mate) mobile with high quality
recording. Samples were played by (real player media) and cassette recorder.
Then they were transferred to papers and the whole examiners group took part in
identifying the utterances. Both, the child and the examiner utterances were
identified and written in order to know the context in which the utterances of
the child were happened (see appendix 2). Then, children's utterances were
discussed by the group regarding their structures and functions.
Confrontational naming and yes\no question and their answer, unless they came
in a natural context, were omitted but, open ended questions that were answered
by one word were counted. Unclear and ambiguous utterances were discussed
according to the number of agreed judgers or listeners. Two of the cases were
taken to our supervisor (Dr. Mousa Amayreh) to make sure of analysis
accurateness. Finally, Children's utterances were written in a table in which
each utterance was written then its structure and function consequently attached
(see appendix 3).
5. Results
Speech samples were analyzed to
determine the recurrence of each sentence type, with regard to sentence
function and structure, then calculated and placed in (Table 1).
Then, the percentages of each type of
sentence production were calculated and placed in (Table 2).
Further more, the mean of each type of
sentence production (in percentage) for the whole 20 children was computed and
placed in (Table 3).
With regard to sentence structure for
children within the age range of three to four years old, the over all
percentage of occurrence of simple sentences was 82.4% of their sentences.
While the percentage for the compound sentence production was 19.1%. And the
percentage of the complex sentences was 4.9%. The percentage for the
compound/complex sentence production was 4%.
In so far as sentence function, the
results exhibited the following percentages; declarative sentences 79.8%,
interrogative sentences 7.8%, negation sentences 7%, imperative sentences 4.3%
and calling .2%. Exclamatory sentences were absent form the speech sample
collected for all subjects.
Table 3:
Mean of each type of sentence production (in percentage) for the whole 20
samples.
|
Structure
of Sentence |
Function
of Sentence |
|||||||
|
Simple |
Compound |
Complex |
Compound
Complex |
Declarative |
Interrogative |
Imperative |
Negation |
calling |
|
82.4 |
19.1 |
4.9 |
0.4 |
79.8 |
7.8 |
4.3 |
7 |
0.2 |
6. Discussion
According to the results of this study,
we observed higher percentages of simple sentences production for subjects at
the age range between three to four years. In contrast, we have discovered that
the production of compound and complex sentences was lower. With tendency of
compound-complex sentences production to be very exceptional and this might be
due to the acquisition of compound sentences is attained at the end of the
second year of life or in the second half of the same year and this is in
accordance to what Abdo and Abdo9
had reported. Furthermore, these results matched what Leopold7 stated in his study that children
displayed the ability to produce complex sentences before their third birthday.
Moreover, there is an agreement between the results of this study and this
study and the results of Ismail10,
in which she reported an increase in the number of simple sentences of children
in the age range of three to four years although the percentage of these
sentences was higher in this study.
With regard to sentence function, we
have observed the increase of declarative sentences production in comparison to
interrogative and negation. Whereas, calling sentences has rarely appeared in
the production of children at this age range. While, exclamatory sentences have
disappeared in the samples that we have collected and this might be attributed
to the unfamiliarity between the examiners and the subjects, which resulted in
the child addressing the questions of the examiner only or narrating stories
though the questions where open ended. This might have caused an increase in
the percentage of simple sentences production too.
7. Conclusions
From the results of this study, we can
conclude the tendency of children three to four years old to utilize simple
sentences more often than other forms of sentences, while they will still acquire
other types of sentence forms such as compound, complex and compound-complex.
Results have shown the increase of declarative
sentences production, with comparison to interrogative, imperative, negation,
calling and exclamatory sentences. Though there was appearance of Wh-
questions, but most of the interrogative sentences were expressed through yes
or no questions. There was a manifestation of interrogative sentence use which
was expressed via intonation. While, there was absence in the utilization of
exclamatory sentences.
8. References