Abstract
The article summarizes the main tendencies in a Czech monolingual child's development of morphology and syntax, then compares the results with those found in foreign research. After analyzing the authentic utterances of the child, the article presents universal strategies for acquiring grammatical categories and illustrates specificities of Czech.
There are universal tendencies in first language acquisition, such as the sequence of acquiring nominal cases and the interrelation between certain verbal categories. Hypergeneralization is another universal tendency.
Grammatical development is linked to cognitive development and pragmatic competence - children express what they need using the language means available, thus the linguistic means necessary to express immediate needs develop faster. The influence of cognitive and pragmatic factors also manifests in syntactic development.
The research shows that the cognitive load of the structure - the mental processes needed to produce the utterance - is more important than the formal structure of the sentence.