Early grammatical development and the emergence of self

Abstract

This research examined the relationship between language development, in particular the acquisition of grammar, and the emergence of reflective self-awareness in 47 toddlers between the ages of 14 and 26 months of age. The linguistic measures, based on mothers' reports of their children's productions on the MacArthur Inventory, were: (a) an index of combinatorial capacity based on an average of the three longest word-combinations multiplied by the frequency of the child's use of combinations, (b) number of grammatical morphemes, and (c) the number of words the child produced. Self-awareness was measured in terms of (a) a child's ability to recognize his mirror image, (b) his ability to substitute himself with a human-like doll in an action sequence (Substituted self), and (c) his ability to demonstrate symbolic substitutions in pretend play at levels progressing from self to other pretend and passive agency to active agency in pretended actions.;Partial correlations controlling for the effects of chronological age and cognitive age (derived from the Bayley) revealed the following. All three linguistic variables correlated significantly with mirror-recognition and self/other substitution in pretend play. Substituted self correlated significantly with lexical development, but it failed to correlate with combinatorial capacity and number of grammatical morphemes. The failure of substituted self to correlate consistently with the linguistic variables is attributed to its not tapping a sufficiently reflective level of self. Matched group comparisons equating for both chronological and cognitive age (based on {dollar}\chi\sp2{dollar} probability tests) revealed that children who evidenced reflective self-awareness were more likely than those not evidencing self-awareness to have gained the use of relational language seen in the employment of word combinations and grammatical morphemes. Additionally, children who evidenced self-awareness were more likely to have a lexicon of more than 50 words, a level commonly used as an indicator of the child's entry into grammatical language. These results are taken to indicate that there is a relation between grammatical development and reflective self-awareness.