Determining a Dnumerating Aijectives in Children ' S Speech 1

The difficulty in scientifically attacking the basic aspects of the linguistic behavior of the child has forced investigators to concern themselves largely with extrinsic determinants and concomitants of speech development, such as intelligence, sex, home environment, and sibling status; and with the more obvious and readily measurable intrinsic characteristics of speech, such as vocabulary growth and sentence length. The analysis of basic grammatical processes must, however, be made before such higher-order phenomena as sentence length can be adequately understood. Although a number of studies have been published on sentence structure, sentence length, and degree of grammatical complexity, the present analysis is one of the first to investigate the development of a specific set of grammatical phenomena namely, the use of determining and numerating adjectives with substantives. It attempts 1) to ascertain whether there are significant trends in the frequency of such words, and in which directions these trends lie; and 2) to describe grammatical development in terms of these trends. The rules for the use of determiners and numeratives are stated by Bloomfield (1, pp. 202-6). The following outline will help to clarify these rules as well as Bloomfield's classification of adjectives: