ABSTRACT
The discussion of structural approaches to describing language presented in Chapter 1 indicated that these approaches provide a relatively elegant and powerful description of the rules which seem to underlie adult language production and comprehension. However, when children first begin to talk their language structures are extremely limited and provide little evidence to support the view of underlying knowledge in terms of traditional grammatical concepts such as sentence subject, noun, verb categories or more sophisticated grammatical systems such as phrase structure or transformational grammar. Bearing in mind that most children do eventually progress to adult levels of competence where structural descriptions are appropriate, the problem remains of the kinds of description which are best suited to early speech and how such descriptions might account for the transition to more abstract grammatical knowledge.
