Grammatical development

• Roger Brown


  Acquisition of bound morphemes

  1. Present participle ”-ing”
  2. Plural “-s”
  3. Possessive “-s”
  4. Past tense “-ed”
  5. Third person singular verbs “-s”
• Bellugi (pronouns)


  1. Children will use a proper noun instead of pronoun
  2. They will then use pronouns but wont distinguish between subject and object
  3. Subject and object are used correctly
• Bellugi (questions)


  1. Rising intonation
  2. Fronting/inversion of the auxiliary verb
  3. Use of wh- words
  4. Use of tag questions
• Bellugi (negatives)


  1. Words ‘no’ and ‘not’ are used in front of expressions
  2. ’Don‘t’ and ‘Can’t’ appear
  3. The child expands their diversity of negative forms to include ‘didn’t’, ‘isn’t’ and ’couldn’t’ etc…