Psycholinguistics 11 Later language Acquisition

Acquisition of Morphology Order of Morpheme acquisition OrderMorpheme 1Present progressive 2-3Prepositions 4Plural 5Irregular past tense 6Possessive 7Uncontractible copular 8Articles 9Regular past tense 10Third person present tense, regular 11Third person present tense, irregular 12Uncontractible auxiliary 13Contractible copular 14Contractible auxiliary

Order of Morpheme Acquisition The order in which children acquire grammatical morphemes is similar across different children. Possible explanations: Frequency with which the child hears these morphemes in adult speech. But Brown found no correlation between the order and the frequency. (e.g. articles)

Linguistic complexity Linguistic complexity is correlated to the order of morpheme acquisition. Semantic complexity Plural: number Third person regular: number, time Auxiliary: number, time, temporary duration Syntactic complexity Transformational grammar as the measure of syntactic complexity Plural: two transformations Third person regular: three transformations Auxiliary: four transformations

Complex Sentences There is an order in the acquisition of complex sentences. e.g. conjunction and Maybe you can carry that and I can carry this. (additive) Jocelyn’s going home and take her sweater off. (temporal) She put a Band-Aid on her shoe and it maked it feel better. (causal)

Metalinguistic awareness The ability to analyze language and reflect on it. Children showed an ability to discriminate between acceptable and unacceptable sentences but were unable to correct the deviant sentences without recourse to semantics. (e.g.2 yds box the open  get in the box instead of open the box)

Arbitrary nature of words Preschool children believe that when the names of objects change, the properties of the object cling to the name when it is transferred. dog  cat with meow

Phonological unit Preschool children seem to have difficulty dealing with phonological units. Sentry on a bridge game: The children had to say the first letter of the toy’s name to get across the bridge.

Discourse Process in Children Conversational skills Ability to adapt one’s speech to the listener. Narrative skills

Conversational skills Categories of child utterances CategoryDefinition NonadjacentThose utterances that occurred without a previous adult utterance, or with a definite pause after a previous adult utterance. AdjacentThose utterances that occurred right after an adult utterance. NoncontigentThose utterances that did not share the same topic as the preceding adult utterance. ImitativeThose utterances that shared the same topic with the preceding utterance, but did not add information; that is, all or part of the preceding utterance was repeated with no change. ContingentThose utterances that both shared the same topic with the preceding utterance and added information to it.

Bloom’s Findings 19 – 23 months: 69% of the utterances were adjacent, but few were contingent. Among the adjacent utterances, noncontingent (31%) were most common, followed by contingent (21%) and finally imitative (17%) 35 – 38 months: percentage of adjacent utterances declined (64%).percentage of contingent utterances more than doubled (46%). Noncontingent and imitative utterances dropped to 16% and 2%. Children have developed the ability to respond appropriately to the topic of conversation (contingent) and to select their own conversational topics (nonadjacent).