Tense-Aspect Abstraction in Russian-Speaking Children in the Early Stages of Native Language Acquisition

Children, while acquiring their native language, move from linking all their utterances to the “here and now” to more abstract speech structures. The categorical situation reflected in children’s speech develops as they gain more speech experience and as their language system and communicative competencies become established. The transition from the semantics of temporal localization to the semantics of temporal non-localization is gradual. The acquisition of the category of personal attribution and the gradual evolution of understanding of its deictic nature, which happens in parallel with the formation of the meaning of iterativeness, contributes to the detailization of the types of the latter. The individual strategies of acquiring a language demonstrated by different children has an influence on the specific timing of the learning and internalizing of tense-aspect category and on the level of a child’s progress in acquiring new levels of semantics of a language