Active Construction of Grammar Theory

The theory mainly focuses on the type of grammar rules that children tend to form in order to be able to communicate at ease. This consequently makes them to be able to incorporate new words into their grammar dictionary and thus they can freely and actively communicate without any problems at all. Moreover, through the words that they hear from their parents or other people who are close to them, they try as much as possible to form the past tense of those words in a bid to try and be able to speak like other people do (Müller, 2016). For instance, a child can form the past tense of the word go to be goer, in order to be able to speak as other people do. Through the active construction of grammar, the child is free to be able to form any types of words which make him or her to be able to learn different forms of words in grammar.

This theory, therefore clearly explains how children are able to learn new words, and be able to come up with new forms of those words in a different tense. This consequently explains why children would therefore pronounce some words in a different way such as the word cooking, and they will therefore form their own pronunciation, thus they may pronounce it like cooing (Müller, 2016). This allows them to be able to speak the way they feel free to do speak, and with time, their form of pronunciation changes due to the new ways of pronunciation and tenses that they learn. On the other hand, old theories can help in explaining how children develop and end up forming words which are very different from the ones being pronounced.

Reference

Müller, S. (2016). Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Berlin: Language Science Press.