UDC

Authors

Abstract

The article deals with conjunction means of Russian-speaking children as one of the important indicators of the syntactic comporent of child's speech development. The paper analyzes various types of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, order of their emergence and their use recorded by the author in the speech development journal. This paper focused on an extract from the journal dealing with 2 to 3 year olds: all cases of the use of conjunctive means (conjunctions, relative pronouns and adverbs) were taken into account. Conjunctions and syndetic words have the same function and are often grouped under one category when studying child speech. In the speech of two-year-old children, there simultaneously emerge different types of relationships: coordinating and subordinating. At this stage, conjunctions only have one, the most relevant for the child, meaning. Besides, children of this age do not use any conjunctions with difficult meanings (concessive and consecutive conjunctions). The research revealed simultaneous emergence and parallel development of coordinating and subordinating structures in child speech, as well as nearly equal number of cases when coordinating and subordinating means were used, which proves that they are equally important in speech acquisition.

Keywords

References

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