Syntaxtualization Flashcards
Early language development is about
lexical and relational semantics
_______ follows function
Form
Signs that form is not developing typically
Constrained constituents, have one or two words and cannot convey whole meaning- words they say will be highly variable (other than the three forms of negation)
What are the universal similarities in meanings?
When children first start talking no matter the language, the content has the same meaning.
Universal similarities assume…
Language is organized by content (and meaning!)
Meaning is the key to ______
discovering form in EARLY Language Development
Length/Complexity of Semantics
1 word , SSWUs, 2- and 3-word phrases (combos and fragments)
Length/Complexity of Syntax
The structural stage is answering where are they at in the developmental sequence of syntax including Simple sentences and complex sentence structure.
Syntaxtualization is…
Following grammar rules! Adhering to form.
How do children begin organizing utterances?
By grammar rather by content.
3 ways we can see syntaxtualization showing up in a language sample
Pronoun Case, Subject Verb Agreement , Passive
Evidence of Syntaxtualization: Pronoun Case
Nominative
I, they, he, she
Accusative
me, them, him, her
Evidence of Syntaxtualization: Subject Verb Agreement
“I walk” vs. “He walks”
“You drive” vs “He walks”
“We eat” vs “It eats”
Making uninflected verbs grammatically correct:
Uninflected verb for I, You, We (the bare verb), but when we talk about, He, She, It; we must add morphemes in order for it to be grammatically correct.
Evidence of Syntax: Passive
Identical content but we change from direct statements (I, you, we) to indirect statements.
“I read the book” vs “The book was read by me.”
“We made a cake” vs “The Cake was made by us”
“He kicked the ball” vs “The ball was kicked by him”
Analyzing Syntactic/ Structural Stage
Lexicon, Grammatical Morphemes, Sentence Pattern
Lexicon
Locatives, Modals, Negatives
Grammatical Morphemes
Free and bound morphemes (box vs boxes = boxness + plurality)
Smallest unit of speech production that communicates meaning
Sentence Pattern (structural complexity)
STRUCTURAL STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT HANDOUT/PDF
Know how to develop early vs late lexical items/sentence patterns
Characteristics of Grammatical Morphemes:
Syntactic functors- the glue of grammar
Low perceptual salience- sensory information
Low phonetic substance- waveform of acoustic info coming in
Sentence internal
Meanings are often already expressed by word order
High frequency – can overcome other characteristics that make them hard to learn
When are we interested in morpheme uses?
Use of morphemes is tied to context. We are interested in if the child uses these grammatical morphemes when they are obligatory.
Order of MASTERY: based on the work of ROGER BROWN
Used over 90% of the time in obligatory contexts, depending on the stages of structural development
Roger Brown created Brown’s Stages and changed the field by defining these stages of grammatical morphemes. Done on a super small normative sample but have withstood the test of time.
Keep in mind: Time of appearance and mastery is variable
-ing progressive
ONE
Earliest with durative and noncompletive verbs ; These verbs are the ones that you do over and over and there is no end point/definite end.
Examples: Me playing , Mommy eating
In/On
TWO
In house, on table
-s plural
STAGE 2 Dev.
Ex. Cats, bears
Irregular Past Tense
Early aspect meaning for completive, nondurative actions and events ; Past tense indicates that the process of the action is done- it happened and it’s over.
Ex. I found , Truck broke , Baby fell
Possesive -s
Mommy’s hat
Grandpa’s car
Uncontracted copula
I am hot
Mommy is mad?
Articles: a, the
STAGE 3
Marks noun phrases and implies specificity
Ex. A big, brown cow ; The dog
Past tense -ed
In GAE, young children inflect verbs with -ed for past tense pretty early on
Skipped, Walked, Talked
3rd person -s
Marks present tense
Just form- grammatical nicety and conventions of lang
Baby sits, He sings
3rd person irregular (has, does)
(1st person I have a cup)
(2nd person You have a cup)
She HAS a cup.
(Who wants ice cream? I do. You do.)
He DOES.
Uncontracted BE auxiliary
The helping verb
He is helping me, I am stirring
Contractible Copula
I’m hot; You’re nice; Everyone’s home; It’s good
Contractible auxiliary
He’s helping me; I’m stirring; You’re going home; Daddy’s drinking
Developmental Points of Interest
Considerable time lapse between first appearance and eventual mastery (emergence of mastery)
Variety of learning curves between morphemes
Frequent over-regularization
Adding the regular form to an already marked irregular form
“Feets”
“We camed home”
Evidence of learning the rule of how to make things plural or how to make things past tense using -ed, so the child is understanding the rules and is applying them to words they want to use!
Look for productivity
Unique productions or repeating what has been said before
When do inflections first appear?
In the most familiar (oldest) semantic contexts. The child uses these the most and then they have space to add syntax. Added to things they learned first.
When do some grammatical morphemes emerge
At the same time as inflections
How to calculate MLU
Segment Utterances
Mark Mazes
Include/Exclude Utterances
Count free and bound morphemes in each utterance
Total morphemes divided by total utterances = MLU
How is MLU calculated
in morphemes and compared to Roger Brown’s stages.
Predict age and determine (in)consistencies for age
MLU-m values
Slight variations between sources
Note the criteria: Paul text, mastery, etc
Clinically- know your source.
If you understand the logic, the variations will not drive you crazy
Text goes into lots of detail/stage
Know “conceptually” (do not try to memorize tables)
Use structural stage sheet for this course
Common utterances that are counted as ONE unit
Let’s, Does, Don’t, Won’t
Concatenatives
Learned as morphological unit- all 1 unit only
Gonna, Wanna, Hafta, Gotta
