Syntactic Rules Used by Children from Preschool through First Grade1

A transformational model of syntactic structures was used to describe children's grammar from under 3 years of age to over 7 years as a self-contained system and to indicate developmental trends. It was found that almost all the basic structures used by adults to generate their sentences are in the grammar of the below 3-yearold children, an indication of how early language is categorized and used in terms of grammatical rules. However, one developmental trend noted was an almost steady rise in the percentages of children using transformations as an increasingly older population was observed. The youngest children excluded rules at the phrase structure and transformational levels of the grammar and alternated more restricted and nonrestricted rules at all three levels of the grammar. The addition of these excluded rules and a change in the number and nature of the restricted forms used seem to be developmental trends.