Acquisition of Morphology and Syntax in Children

How and when children acquire the basic and essential rules of English morphology and syntax are questions that have been explored for decades. While there are no final conclusions about precisely how and when this happens, many researchers have worked to describe the process in terms that apply to most children most of the time. This paper examines the acquisition of morphological rules for English nouns, verbs, and adjectives, focusing on native speakers of English who are exposed to English during what is known as the critical period of language acquisition. This paper will create a dialogue among several extant articles on the subject, synthesizing prior research to create a description of the patterns of morphological rules acquisition in English language children. It is expected that the literature will reveal that children are able to extend rules of English morphology to novel nouns and verbs, but are unable to extend rules of English morphology to novel adjectives, and have greater facility with regular forms of words than with irregular forms of words in the given groups.