When do children stop mimicking adults & start creating sentences from scratch? According to UChicago researchers [behind a paywall I’m afraid], at around 30 months of age, kids begin forming determiner-noun combinations (e.g., a cat, the cat) they’ve never heard before. This marks a major milestone in linguistic productivity—the ability to apply rules & generate new language.
How did researchers figure this out? They paired behavioural observations of 64 children with a computational model trained to mimic their language exposure. Both the children & the model started generating unique phrases around the same age, showing that by 30 months, children go beyond memorisation to rule-based language creation.
Why It Matters
This study contributes to the debate on how much linguistic input children need to start generalising grammar rules. It’s not just about determiners!
- Irregular Verb Errors: The phenomenon of overregularisation (e.g., I goed or I thinked) has been extensively studied in the work of researchers like Jean Berko Gleason, whose famous *Wug Test (1958) demonstrated children’s ability to apply grammatical rules to novel words. Additionally, studies by Marcus et al. (1992) confirmed that errors with irregular verbs highlight rule-based generalisation rather than rote memorisation.
- Universal Grammar: The concept stems from Noam Chomsky’s theory of innate linguistic structures, first introduced in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). Chomsky argued that humans possess an inherent ability to acquire grammar, which studies like this current research continue to support.
- Language Transparency in Turkish: Research into morphologically rich languages shows that children acquiring Turkish, Finnish & Hungarian often achieve grammatical milestones earlier than English learners because of the transparent relationship between grammatical forms & their meanings.
- Homesign Systems: Studies on homesigners, children without access to formal language input who are able to create their own linguistic systems, explore how they are able to achieve this feat. These systems often reveal universal patterns of grammar acquisition.
This all reminds me of the time I heard Scott Thornbury state [I can’t seem to find a reference] that ‘grammar’ is a verb, it’s a thing we do. In other words, it’s what our brain naturally does when faced with all this input. When children hear language, they don’t just store words passively—they instinctively start looking for patterns, applying rules & testing hypotheses. This process of “grammaring” [a term coined by Larsen Freeman] is what enables us to go beyond mimicry & begin taking ownership of our mother tongue.
Teacher Takeaways:
Reframe Errors as Progress: Mistakes like I goed show learners are internalising & applying grammar rules. It shows they’ve learnt something!
*if you were to guess that the plural of “wug” is “wugs“, it shows you possess an innate understanding of linguistic rules governing noun inflection, putting you on a par with children as young as 2-3 years old!
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