| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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Brown (1973) was the first to study, systematically and longitudinally, the acquisition of English morphemes, among them the articles a and the. Brown observed that children in the early stages of first language acquisition appear to leave out grammatical morphemes rather than lexical morphemes, producing sentences such as Here bed, Chair broken,or Not dada. In other words, the content words (mainly nouns, verbs, and adjectives) are used much more frequently in the early stage speech while, in sharp contrast, the function words such as inflections, auxiliaries, prepositions, articles, and the copula “are used seldom or not at all” (p. 249). Brown characterized the early stage of children’s speech as telegraphic for the very reason that “the sentences the child makes are like adult telegrams in that they are largely made up of nouns and verbs…and in that they generally do not use prepositions, conjunctions, articles, or auxiliary verbs” (p. 75). Grammatical morphemes or function words gradually appear in children’s sentences over a period of time. Brown accordingly investigated the emergence of 14 grammatical morphemes in Eve, Adam, and Sarah, three selected American children between the ages of 18 to 44 months old. Two hours of their speech were recorded every month and were analyzed to see how many times per recording each morpheme occurred in “obligatory contexts,” occasions in which a native speaker is obliged to use particular morphemes in the sentence. The child was regarded as having acquired a morpheme when it was supplied correctly in over 90% of obligatory contexts for three consecutive recordings; the separate points at which each morpheme was acquired were put in sequence to determine an order of acquisition. The orders for each of the three children were then averaged to identify a common sequence for their first language acquisition. Brown found that although each of the children developed at an individual rate, the acquisition of 14 grammatical morphemes in English for those three children was invariant in the following order: Present progressive -ing (as in He is sitting down) → Preposition in (as in The mouse is in the box) → Preposition on (as in The book is on the table) → Plural -s (as in The dogs ran away) → Past