Development of Morphology and Syntax Flashcards
Inflectional Morphemes
add grammatical info
Derivational Morphemes
change the part of speech, meaning, or create a new word
ex) teach/er
Before children can use inflections, they need to know:
- where on a word they can be added
- what kind of words inflections can go on
- which words belong to which paradigms
Omission vs. Commission
omitted vs. produced incorrectly
What factors determine morphological order of acquisition?
- semantic complexity (meaning)
- formal complexity (how hard is the rule)
- frequency (appears on many stems)
Contractable copula
can be or is contracted
ex) She’s hungry. She is hungry
Uncontractable copula
She was hungry.
There it is.
Contractable auxiliary
She’s running.
Uncontractable auxiliary
She was running.
What are some problems in studying a child’s syntactic development?
- child’s grammar systems are always changing
- they use different rules in different situations
- competence vs. performance
one word stage
12 months
one word to two word stage
18 months
vertical construction
related words in a sequence- independently
ex) Mommy. Bottle.
unanalyzed word combinations
the child learned the phrase as a whole but may not understand each individual word
word+jargon
real word mixed into jargon
24 months
2 word combos and 3 words
2-5 years old
grammatical morphemes develop
telegraphic speech
- 2 word stage
- child leaves out function words
- uses mostly content words
Why is the acquisition of verbs important?
- verbs govern structure
- verbs control semantic roles
intransitive verb
cannot take an object
ex) She smiled.
transitive verb
takes an object
ex) She bought something.
optional infinitive stage
sometimes children produce verbs with tense and sometimes not
- should end around age 3
- may be relevant to children with SLI
Where and what
26 months
who
28 months
how and why
33 months
when
36 months
why are “why, when, and how” more difficult?
they are conceptual terms that ask about relations between people/things
holistic syntactic development
- focus on prosodic tune
- look at language in chunks (unanalyzed)
analytic syntactic development
- smaller pieces to bigger
- understand smaller pieces and how they combine
