| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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irregular -ed (as in The boy went home) → Possessive -s (as in The girl’s dog is big) → Uncontractible copula be (as in Are they boys or girls?) → Articles a/the (as in He has a book) → Past regular -ed (as in He jumped the stream) → 3rd person regular -s (as in She runs very fast) → 3rd person irregular -s (as in Does the dog bark?) → Uncontractible auxiliary be (as in Is he running?) → Contractible copular be (as in That’s a spaniel) → Contractible auxiliary be (as in They’re running very slowly).
As shown in the aforementioned acquisition pattern, a and the are treated as one linguistic element under the cover term of a/the. According to Brown,
For this reason, Brown “lumped together all contexts requiring either a or the and established a single acquisition point for articles.”
Among the 14 grammatical morphemes, the acquisition of articles is in the eighth place. Brown concluded that both grammatical and semantic complexity were major determinants of the order in which the morphemes were acquired, but that the two were probably interrelated and neither could be isolated as the sole determinant of the acquisition order. Brown’s study is significant for the language learning theory, which states that all children learn the various grammatical features of English in a similar order.
The same order of morphemes that Brown discovered was also obtained in de Villiers and de Villiers’s (1973) cross-sectional study of 21 English-speaking children between the ages of 16 to 40 months. As stated by de Villiers and de Villiers, “the correlations obtained between the two