The Two Word- Utterances

The Two Word- Utterances

The two- word stage begins when the child is about 18 months to two years old. During this period infants make a remarkable transition as their vocabulary exceeds the 50 words. Children begin to use various combinations such as “daddy car” or “where katy”. Further, many investigations have revealed that though there are some restriction, children demonstrate an astonishing way of using grammatical words. This grammatical precocity makes their two word utterances look like edited (ready- made) versions that can convey a clear and full message. (Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith, 2001) cited in Levin and Munsch (2010:311) argue that:

Children begin to combine words in phrases such as Mommy up or All gone kitty. This is the beginning of their use of grammar, and it demonstrates that children create their own grammar, rather than simply making mistakes in using adult grammar

By the same token Waxman & Kosowski (1990, p. 1463) cited in Levin and Munsch (ibid) point out that “After children have acquired a number of words in their vocabulary, they enter a stage of “rapid syntactic and semantic development”.

Thus, if we consider the two- word utterances we can notice that a variety of distinct words classes is combined. For example the two- word form “daddy car” is composed of two words form the same class of nouns. i.e. daddy noun and car noun, whereas the speech form of “where Katty” consists of an interrogative pronoun (where) and linked to the proper noun „Katty‟.

Actually, the various studies conducted about this stage allege that all children all over the world put forth language in similar ways following a regular word order. So, they utter only key words about their inquiries so as to convey the information they want. Indeed, in the following form: “eat apple‟ is more common than “I‟ m eating an apple”. These child specific forms may contain repeated words which have been described in terms of pivots. Pivots words come either at the beginning of infant‟s two word forms or at the end, while we may distinguish some other words which plug into the vacant slot (i.e. they are utilized only to fill in the gaps).

 Initial pivots: „more, all, no‟ as in „more fish, more cookie‟

 Final pivots: „off‟ as in „light off‟.

The following table can be a good illustration about the idea that almost all children around the world use language similarly:

Table 02: Similarities in Children’s spontaneous Two –Word Sentences in Four Languages

The above table compares the Acquisition of L1 in four languages. It shows that the ways of acquiring a language can be said to be universal especially at the two-word stage in terms of children‟s inclusion of some grammatical functions.

Table:  adapted from psycholinguistics 2nd ed, by Slobin (1979) and retrieved from Shaffer & Kipp (2010: 408)