Syntactic Errors in Simple Sentences of Five-Year-Old Kindergarten Children: A Systematic Literature Review
Keywords:
Syntactic Errors, Simple Sentences, 5-Year-Old Children, Kindergarten Children, Systematic Literature Review.
Abstract
This systematic literature review examines syntactic errors in simple spoken sentences produced by five-year-old kindergarten children. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, forty peer-reviewed studies were systematically selected and analyzed to identify dominant error types and underlying factors in first-language acquisition contexts. The findings reveal that omission, word order errors, subject–verb disagreement, and overgeneralization are the most frequently reported syntactic errors, reflecting ongoing grammatical development rather than language impairment. The review further identifies developmental stage, limited exposure to complex linguistic input, cognitive processing constraints, and classroom practices as key contributing factors. These findings highlight the importance of linguistically rich interaction and informed pedagogical strategies to support syntactic development in early childhood education settings.
References
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Rowe, M. L. (2012). A longitudinal investigation of the role of quantity and quality of child-directed speech in vocabulary development. Child Development, 83(5), 1762–1774. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01805.x
Someya, T., Sugimoto, Y., & Oseki, Y. (2024). JCoLA: Japanese corpus of linguistic acceptability. In N. Calzolari et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 9477–9488). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Harvard University Press.
Yang, C. (2016). The price of linguistic productivity: How children learn to break the rules of language. MIT Press.
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F., Chang, F., & Lieven, E. V. M. (2015). The acquisition of verb argument structure in young children. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1, 95–119. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030514-125236
Arehalli, S., & Linzen, T. (2024). Neural networks as cognitive models of the processing of syntactic constraints. Open Mind, 8, 558–614. https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00137
Arslan, B., Çiyiltepe, M. M., & Karaman, M. (2025). Syntactic scrambling in Broca’s aphasia: A Turkish sample. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica. https://doi.org/10.1159/000543595
Baranivska, O. (2024). Syntactic errors made by Polish students learning Ukrainian. Roczniki Humanistyczne, 72(10), 184–199. https://doi.org/10.18290/rh247210.12
Bock, J. K., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Language production: Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 945–984). Academic Press.
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages. Harvard University Press.
Clahsen, H., Rothweiler, M., Woest, A., & Marcus, G. F. (2002). Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals. Cognition, 45(3), 225–255. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(92)90041-A
Gallagher, J. W. (1969). Semantic relationship and the learning of syntactic word pairs in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 8(3), 411–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(69)90114-3
Godin, M.-P., & Leblanc, A. (2025). Written text production in French-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder: Insight into syntactic errors. Reading and Writing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-025-10637-9
Hamann, C., & Abed Ibrahim, L. (2017). Methods for identifying specific language impairment in bilingual populations in Germany. Frontiers in Communication, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2017.00016
Hoff, E. (2006). How social contexts support and shape language development. Developmental Review, 26(1), 55–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2005.11.002
Husain, S. (2021). Revisiting anti-locality effects: Evidence against prediction-based accounts. Journal of Memory and Language, 121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2021.104280
Ivanova, E. G., Skvortsov, A. A., & Mikadze, Y. V. (2021). Writing errors in Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasias as a manifestation of functional strategies for writing. Vestnik Vosstanovitel’noj Mediciny, 20(1), 51–59. https://doi.org/10.38025/2078-1962-2021-20-1-51-59
Ji, P., Feng, Y., Liu, J., Zhao, Z., & Xu, B. (2021). Automated testing for machine translation via constituency invariance (pp. 468–479). https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE51524.2021.9678715
Kidd, E., Donnelly, S., & Christiansen, M. H. (2018). Individual differences in language acquisition and processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(2), 154–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.11.006
Lieven, E., Behrens, H., Speares, J., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Early syntactic creativity: A usage-based approach. Journal of Child Language, 30(2), 333–370. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000903005592
Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., & Pizzicannella, E. (2018). Handwriting, spelling, and narrative competence in the fictional stories of Italian primary-school children. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 33(2), 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-017-0328-y
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(4), 1–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166115
Nie, C., Su, Y., Durrleman, S., & He, X. (2025). Differences in language impairment between developmental language disorder and autism: Insights from Mandarin ba and bei constructions. Autism and Developmental Language Impairments, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23969415251341248
Pham, G., & Simpson, A. (2024). The use of classifiers in Vietnamese in typical and atypical language development. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics, 22(1), 89–113. https://doi.org/10.6519/TJL.202401_22(1).0004
Qi, Z., Love, J., Fisher, C., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2020). Referential context and executive functioning influence children’s resolution of syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(10), 1922–1947. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000886
Rice, M. L., Wexler, K., & Hershberger, S. (2010). Tense over time: The longitudinal course of tense acquisition in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41(6), 1412–1431. https://doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4106.1412
Rowe, M. L. (2012). A longitudinal investigation of the role of quantity and quality of child-directed speech in vocabulary development. Child Development, 83(5), 1762–1774. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01805.x
Someya, T., Sugimoto, Y., & Oseki, Y. (2024). JCoLA: Japanese corpus of linguistic acceptability. In N. Calzolari et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 9477–9488). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Harvard University Press.
Yang, C. (2016). The price of linguistic productivity: How children learn to break the rules of language. MIT Press.
Published
2025-12-31
How to Cite
Anisah, Z. (2025, December 31). Syntactic Errors in Simple Sentences of Five-Year-Old Kindergarten Children: A Systematic Literature Review. Al Hikmah Indonesian Journal of Early Childhood Islamic Education, 9(2), 467-475. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.35896/ijecie.v9i2.1172
Section
Articles
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
