The utterances 'Book read me.' and 'Me TV see.' from a 3-year-old monolingual English-speaking child indicate a problem with which language domain?

• A. Semantic redundancy
• B. Syntactic relationships
• C. Morphological relationships
• D. Pragmatics

Answer: (B)

The main concept here is syntactic relationships—the way sentence parts are organized to show who is doing what to whom. In English, we typically build sentences with a subject performing an action on an object in a clear order (for example, “I read a book” or “Read me a book”). The child’s utterances use the words but place them in a nonstandard order and omit a clear subject, so the mapping between who is doing the action and to whom or what the action is directed isn’t established. This shows a difficulty with assembling the relationships between words that make up a well-formed sentence, rather than a problem with the meanings of the words themselves, the word forms, or the social use of language. So, the issue is about how words relate to each other in sentence structure, i.e., syntax.