Abstract - Alexandra Petraru

The aims of this study were to examine the language development of one child and compare it with patterns of development reported in the literature.  A number of aspects of language acquisition were examined including vocabulary development and grammatical growth as well as the acquisition of communicative abilities.  This was a longitudinal study: a child’s language was examined at three developmental stages: one-word utterances, two-word utterances, and multi-word combinations.  Three 60-utterance samples were extracted from a larger corpus collected on a boy (Peter) between the ages of 1;9 and 3;2 that had been transcribed and is available on the CHILDES database. The changes in the distribution of lexical categories (Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs) and function words across Peter’s three transcripts were consistent with the literature, as was Peter’s mean length of utterances and the lack of inflectional morphemes in the first two transcripts.  Peter’s two-word combinations illustrated a few of the semantic relations expressed by children at the same stages of development.  The analysis of his verb production in relation to that of the adults with whom he was interacting tended to confirm the Constructivist hypothesis: his first use of these verbs was very close to that of the adults. Differences between results of the analyses of Peter’s language sample and the findings documented in the literature may be due to sampling effects and/or they may reflect individual variation.  For instance, the absence of social/personal words may be due to the sampling of the transcripts, which did not include the beginning of the interactions between Peter and the adults.  The absence of “ing,” the first inflectional morpheme acquired by English-speaking children, in Peter’s Transcript 3 may be due to the limited size of the data sample, which may also explain the absence of “will” in Peter’s transcript despite the fact that occurrence of this auxiliary is expected based on other aspects of his language development and his age. 

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