Acquisition of Syntactic Structures in L1

Abstract A linguistic analysis of 2 to 7 years old children’s naturally produced utterances was conducted to examine the development of different syntactic structures. The results showed that children use certain structures very infrequently and certain other structures are missing in their production. For example, there was no instance of passives in this corpus which included 894 utterances. Relative clauses were used with a very low frequency across all age groups. Reflexive pronouns were produced markedly less frequently than pronouns. At the early stages of language acquisition, the two values of the pro-drop parameter were used interchangeably. But with older children, the use of the pro-drop parameter with a positive value was more frequent. As for the interrogatives, the youngest children used intonation for making questions more frequently than the other age groups. And the most difficult wh-question structure for them was using the wh-word in initial position. Each of these findings has been discussed in the framework of the related theories and contrasts with the findings in the literature have been reviewed.