WEEK 5- INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY Flashcards

Question

what happens when enough constructions have been stored?

Answer 1

the child schematizes or abstracts across them to form morphological constructions - realises verb+ s is present tense and verb+ ed is past tense

Answer 2

the level of a single word or an auxillary+ verb combination

Answer 3

child inserts the verb into a suitable slot and frame pattern (again at any level) either single words or whole utterances

Answer 4

once the child can produce one form using this rule she should be equally good at a) adding -s to all the different verbs that she knows and b) at adding all the different morphemes that she knows to a particular verb ie they show full productivity

Answer 5

a) the child might simply have rote- learned plays and not yet any relevant slot- and- frame patterns. so if she hasnt learned walks she has no schema to produce it with b) the child may have a verb+s pattern (so can produce plays/walks) but not verb+

Answer 6

it does not mean that children will never miss off inflectional morphemes (eg he like cake) they argue children go through a stage where children go through a stage in which they think inflectional morphemes are optional and so make 'root infinitive errors'- happens during the accusational period

Answer 7

a) children might not always add 3sg- s to a verb when it is required (as they think its okay to leave it off) but they should be equally good at doing so with different verbs. they should be better at correctly supplying 3sg-s with some verbs than other. b) children might not always supply agreement- marking morphemes when required (as they think its okay to leave off) but they should be equally good at supplying all the different morphemes that they know. they shouldnt be better at supplying some of these morphemes than others c) children might not always supply agreement- marking morphemes when required but tehy should never supply the wrong one as the rule knows which morpheme marks which combination of person/ number agreement

Answer 8

'all the different forms of that auxillary'

Answer 9

is/am/are/was/were

Answer 10

Rasanen, Ambridge and pine 2014- elicited production of 3sg-s with real verbs. across 48 different verbs, correlation observed between the proportion of 3sg vs bare forms in the input and correct production of 3sg-s. 100% correct for fits vs fit. 65% correct for climbs vs climb

Answer 11

shows that children start out by learning and using- ready inflected forms directly from the input. the higher the frequency in the input the greater probability that children will store/ retrieve it when required

Answer 12

children might not always supply agreement- marking morphemes when required. but they should be equally good at supplying all the different morphemes that they know. they shouldn't be better at supplying some of these morphemes than others

Answer 13

naturalistic data study looked at children's use of the following present tense person/ number agreement morphemes

Answer 14

each individual child showed different rates of correct porduction for the three different types of morphemes (that are different forms of the same auxillary) with in each case- at least two of the three comparisons statistically. eg Nina for auxillary BE - he's coming- 82% supplied. 9% supplied.

Answer 15

he didn't control for knowledge of individual morphemes

Answer 16

pine et al 2008 repeated it but counting only from the point at which children first correctly used each individual morpheme and therefore they 'knew' that morpheme (under the generativist accounts)

Answer 17

it doesnt have that many morphemes

Answer 18

aguado- orea and pine 2015- spanish has 18 morphemes (even just looking at the three major verb types in the present tense. adult utterances were randomly deleted to ensure the child and adult corpora were the same size. analysis restricted to morphemes that both the child and parents had used even with these controls.. child used significiantly fewer different morphemes per verb than the mother

Answer 19

maybe children just like to talk about a narrower range of people than adults. one way around this is to use elicited production studies

Answer 20

findings are against the generativist production of equal peformance with different morphemes. children are better at supplying some morphemes than others and use fewer different morphemes per verb than adults do

Answer 21

their tense/ agreement features. the rule will never allow children to select the wrong one

Answer 22

young german speaking children do not make argument mistakes. a well established fact in child language is that errors of omission are extremely common while errors of substitution (I eats cake) are very rare .when finite forms are used agreement is almost always correct

Answer 23

makes these errors hard to spot/ think about. a more straightforward example is a spanish child using a 3sg verb form in a context that requires a 3pl form. eg el come (he 3sg eats 3sg)

Answer 24

if most of what children say is rote learned OF COURSE they will make a very few errors. if they learn i like as a frozen phrase or i like NOUN as a slot and frame pattern of course they wont say i likes. but if we look forms that the child rarely attempts to produce (eg 3pl) they show much higher error rates. aguado- orea 2004- spanish counting from the point at which the child produced his first correct 3 pl form (so he knew the morpheme) juan produced 75 errors where the 3sg was used instead

Answer 25

a) incorrectly repeating an unsuitable form from an adult utterance eg adult: bill likes cake child john and bill likes cake b) defaulting to the most frequent form child isnt sure which to produce so just produces the most readily available (ie the most frequent)

Answer 26

children make an error when they havent learned the relevant low frequency form, so instead use a well- learned high frequency form