ENG 236: Applied Grammar and Syntax

This established text--now revised and updated--reveals how spoken language skills are acquired and how they affect children's later reading and writing achievement. With a unique focus on the needs of educators, the book examines the foundations of language in the developing brain. It explores the relationship of language processes to core literacy skills and probes the impact of motivational and sociocultural factors on children's learning. Implications of developmental knowledge for classroom instruction are highlighted, and effective practices reviewed.
*Chapter 6 is "The Development of Grammatical Knowledge."

This book presents a comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data from English-speaking children aged 2 to 5, Holger Diessel investigates the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and nonfinite relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and coordinate clauses. His investigation shows that the development of complex sentences originates from simple non-embedded sentences and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complex sentences including complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are gradually expanded to multiple-clause constructions, and complex sentences including adverbial and coordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated in a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the semantic and syntactic complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the social-cognitive development of the child.

This textbooks introduces the main arguments for an innate, domain specific capacity to learn human language. It guides you through the growth of language in a typically developing child and also discusses a range of viewpoints, introducing the central controversies in the field of language acquisition. Taking models and analyses from generative phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, the author describes children's language acquisition using examples from a wide variety of languages. She explores the connections between language and other aspects of human cognition, the role of environment in learning, and the role in language development of mechanisms for speech production and speech comprehension. Extensively illustrated with models and figures, each chapter is also followed by a summary box, exercises and questions for discussion. An appendix of research techniques and suggestions for further reading is also included, to provide a Chomskyan introduction to language acquisition for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in linguistics and cognitive science.

"Grammar and Syntax: Developing School-Age Childrens Oral and Written Language Skills provides insight for clinical speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as well as students and faculty in communication sciences and disorders programs. Offering a practicing speech-language pathologists perspective on school-age language development, this professional reference book focuses on later language development and the crucial role oral grammar and syntax plays in successful academic performance"--