Development of Morphology and Syntax

Question 1

Inflectional Morphemes

Answer 1

add grammatical info

Question 2

Derivational Morphemes

Answer 2

change the part of speech, meaning, or create a new word

ex) teach/er

Question 3

Before children can use inflections, they need to know:

Answer 3

• where on a word they can be added
• what kind of words inflections can go on
• which words belong to which paradigms

Question 4

Omission vs. Commission

Answer 4

omitted vs. produced incorrectly

Question 5

What factors determine morphological order of acquisition?

Answer 5

• semantic complexity (meaning)
• formal complexity (how hard is the rule)
• frequency (appears on many stems)

Question 6

Contractable copula

Answer 6

can be or is contracted

ex) She’s hungry. She is hungry

Question 7

Uncontractable copula

Answer 7

She was hungry.

There it is.

Question 8

Contractable auxiliary

Answer 8

She’s running.

Question 9

Uncontractable auxiliary

Answer 9

She was running.

Question 10

What are some problems in studying a child’s syntactic development?

Answer 10

• child’s grammar systems are always changing
• they use different rules in different situations
• competence vs. performance

Question 11

one word stage

Answer 11

12 months

Question 12

one word to two word stage

Answer 12

18 months

Question 13

vertical construction

Answer 13

related words in a sequence- independently

ex) Mommy. Bottle.

Question 14

unanalyzed word combinations

Answer 14

the child learned the phrase as a whole but may not understand each individual word

Question 15

word+jargon

Answer 15

real word mixed into jargon

Question 16

24 months

Answer 16

2 word combos and 3 words

Question 17

2-5 years old

Answer 17

grammatical morphemes develop

Question 18

telegraphic speech

Answer 18

• 2 word stage
• child leaves out function words
• uses mostly content words

Question 19

Why is the acquisition of verbs important?

Answer 19

• verbs govern structure

- verbs control semantic roles

Question 20

intransitive verb

Answer 20

cannot take an object

ex) She smiled.

Question 21

transitive verb

Answer 21

takes an object

ex) She bought something.

Question 22

optional infinitive stage

Answer 22

sometimes children produce verbs with tense and sometimes not

• should end around age 3
• may be relevant to children with SLI

Question 23

Where and what

Answer 23

26 months

Question 24

who

Answer 24

28 months

Question 25

how and why

Answer 25

33 months

Question 26

when

Answer 26

36 months

Question 27

why are “why, when, and how” more difficult?

Answer 27

they are conceptual terms that ask about relations between people/things

Question 28

holistic syntactic development

Answer 28

• focus on prosodic tune

- look at language in chunks (unanalyzed)

Question 29

analytic syntactic development

Answer 29

• smaller pieces to bigger

- understand smaller pieces and how they combine