Do children really understand grammar?

When you hear a child using complex and intricate grammar or vocabulary, how can you be sure that the child truly understands the meaning of the sentence or word? After all imitation is very important in the development of grammar. In fact, According to David Crystal, the sentence patterns that children use are very often first imitated from older speakers before they are used in their own spontaneous speech. Imitation is a common bridge between comprehension and spontaneous language, so how do you know that the child isn't merely imitating and doesn't actually understand the true meaning of his language?

 

According to Crystal, one study showed that a two-year-old was recorded saying "hat on off", as if 'hat on' was the noun instead of just 'hat'. This thus proves that child did not understand the grammatical structure he was using, and taps into the theories of speech comprehension – Does the child associate one word with the action, or understand the whole sentence? For example, if you ask a child to "go get his pajamas from his bedroom", the child may only understand the word 'pajamas' but because he knows where the pajamas are kept he would still perform the same task as if he had understood the whole sentence.

 

When a child sees his father drive away in his car, a young child may say "go car". Upon hearing this, his mother may reply "yes, daddy is going in his car", expanding grammatically on her child's utterance. Brown's research project showed that expansions appeared in one third of mother's language and they were used as teaching aids - they would expand the grammatical structure of the child's utterance as a target slightly ahead of their child's performance. The only flaw with Brown's project was that there were always researchers present. How does that change anything?

 

Well, A project set up by Well involved no researchers. Well set up microphones in a house with a mother and child inhabiting it, and would record for 90 seconds at 20 minute intervals, so that the mother would never know when she was being recorded. Well found that the mother only expanded when other adults were present, suggesting that 'expansion' acts just as a gloss for the benefit of an observer and not as to provide the child with more grammatical information.

 

The problem with studying children's language is that it is very difficult to measure their level of grammatical comprehension. If you try and test a child, he may not understand the question fully and get confused. Take the lorry test for example. When a toy lorry is placed on a table in front of a child and you ask the child to place a coin at the back of the lorry, do you mean the back of the actual model or the opposite side that is facing you? What about if the child isn't on the same side of the table as you? It can be confusing. The other problem is that if a child knows that he is under exam circumstances he may react in an awkward way, for example responding with something irrelevant when asked a simple question. Researchers are always looking for new ways to test children, but will we ever truly know what children really understand? From the research I have found here, the clearest way to test children's grammatical understanding may come from undercover evidence; video, audio devices. Looking at a variety of sentences to test each individual word for comprehension.

Emily Meades