MORPHOLOGY: ACQUISITION

A child’s early utterances lack a system of inflections; the child tends to adopt a single form for all contexts– either the root or the most frequent inflected form. One theory in the Chomskyan tradition (Radford, 1990) suggests that the grammar with which an infant is born lacks a morphological component, which develops later as part of maturation.

 The speed with which inflections are acquired appears to be partly determined by whether there is a single form for each function. For example, infants growing up bilingual in Hungarian and Serbo Croatian produce inflections of location earlier in Hungarian, which has a different suffix for each type of location in a way that Serbo Croatian does not.

Some commentators have suggested that perceptual saliency may also be a factor in the acquisition of inflections. English inflections are of low perceptibility compared with (say) those of Italian– one possible explanation of why the use of inflections is much less affected in the speech of Italians with specific language impairment than it is with English sufferers.

Early research suggested that basic English inflections appear in the infant’s productions in a fixed order of acquisition. However, it is difficult to say precisely when a form has been ‘acquired’. Indeed, a suggestion has been made that many regular verb forms may first be acquired by an infant as separate items (WALKED, WAITED, FOLLOWED) before an inflectional rule (‘add-ed’) is later inferred.

Semantic notions also appear to support the development of morphological knowledge. Early use of the-ing inflection in English seems to be associated with extended events: it often appears first with durative verbs such as WAIT. Similarly, the-ed inflection is associated with momentaneous events, and often appears first with verbs like DROP.

See also: Mapping, Order of acquisition, Syntactic development

Further reading: Derwing and Baker (1986); Owens (2001); Peters (1995)

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