A study by Brown and Fraser (1963) shows that children tend to use telegraphic speech, employing content and omitting function words. This limitation involves the grammatical or semantic complexity of the sentences. Braine (1963) attempted to formulate productive rules for the initial stages in the acquisition of syntax by identifying two classes…

This investigation studied the development of certain predicates called factives, such as "sad,""happy,""know," and "true," by studying the semantic effects of negation on the complements of both factive and non-factive predicates. The subjects were 60 children, divided into three age groups of ten boys and…

As may be seen from data collected during language observations of four children over a period of two and a half years, children's sentences are not simply flawed versions of adult counterparts, but seem to result from a different grammar. These data indicate that logical formatives, such as "even," and "only," are sentence-initial constituents.…

The syntactic properties of the child's language are studied. Within the framework of transformational grammar, the rules of syntax can be divided into three types: base- or phrase-structure rules, transformational rules, and morphological rules. Each of these rules is discussed. It is stated that the one process that appears to characterize each…