Development of spoken grammar

When children are beginning to learn language, many grammatical structures may be incorrect, or absent (e.g., “I want more milk” might be “Me want milk”, and “Daddy is sleeping” might be “Daddy sleep”). This is not uncommon, as children begin to pick up language in everyday conversations and interactions. However, at a certain age, children are expected to use these grammatical forms correctly in everyday conversations. The ‘grammatical forms’ that we are interested in observing include:

• Pronouns (e.g. he, she)
• Verb tense (e.g. kick, kicking, kicked)
• Irregular verbs (e.g. catch, caught)
• Auxiliary verbs (e.g. is)
• Plurals (e.g. cat, cats)
• Sentence articles (e.g. a, an, the)

Please take a look at the tables below for approximate developmental milestones for grammar.