The Child’s Language System during the Vocabulary Explosion: Individual and Common Trends

A longitudinal diary study on the formation of two young girls’ individual language systems was carried out. In both cases, the general language ability was tracked by considering its key components, including the phonetic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic ones, as well as imitation skills and early metalinguistic awareness. The relation between these components (autonomy or mutual influence) was examined. The MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) were used as an auxiliary tool. The findings of the two case studies were compared with the published results of a systemic analysis based on the extensive MacArthur–Bates-CDI database on various components of general language ability. The comparisons revealed shared and individual language acquisition patterns in the early stages of speech ontogenesis. The obtained data are consistent with those reported in previous research: in the early stage of language acquisition, the speech of the girls was marked by an interaction between the phonetic (articulation of complex three- or four-syllable words), lexical (vocabulary growth), and morphological (learning grammatical categories) components, while the syntactic component progressed relatively autonomously; and then, during the later stage, morphological skills served more as a supportive mechanism that facilitated the construction of grammatically accurate syntactic structures. 

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