Function morphemes in young children's speech perception and production.

Abstract

Function morphemes or functors (e.g., articles and verb inflections) potentially provide children with cues for segmenting speech into constituents, as well as for labeling these constituents (e.g., noun phrase [NP] and verb phrase [VP]). However, the fact that young children often fail to produce functors may indicate that they ignore these cues in early language acquisition. Alternatively, children may be sensitive to functors in perception, but omit them in production. In 3 experiments, 2year-olds imitated sentences that contained English or non-English functors and that were controlled for both suprasegmental and segmental factors. Children omitted English functors more frequently than non-English functors, indicating perceptual sensitivity to familiar vs. unfamiliar elements. The results suggest that children may be able to use functors early in language acquisition to solve the segmentation and labeling problems.How do children come to treat the incoming speech stream as composed of linguistic units, such as clauses and phrases? How are they able to distinguish among different types of these constituents? We shall refer to these as the segmentation and labeling problems, respectively. Recent discussions have begun to focus on the importance of function morphemes in guiding young children to segment speech and to label grammatical categories (Gleitman & Wanner, 1982;Maratsos, 1982;Morgan, Meier, & Newport, 1987;Valian & Coulson, 1988). However, children learning English and other languages typically omit function morphemes in their spontaneous and imitative speech, suggesting that these cues may not be used in the earliest stages of learning. In this article, we examine the alternative possibility that young children detect and analyze functors even though they omit them in their speech. More specifically, we assess the possibility that functors are analyzed with sufficient detail to support both segmentation and labeling.In English and in other languages, syntactic units such asThis research was carried out by LouAnn Gerken as part of her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Some of the results were pre-

The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals

“…Each of these procedures, it should be pointed out, has impressive support in the child language literature. Children learning English and other languages with stress do make use of stress rhythm in segmentation (Gerken, 1991;Gerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990;Peters, 1985). Children learning French and other languages with syllable rhythm do use syllables in segmentation (Alegria, Pignot, & Morais, 1982;Content, Kolinsky, Morais, & Bertelson, 1986).…”

Functional Elements in Infants' Speech Processing: The Role of Determiners in the Syntactic Categorization of Lexical Elements

“…There is converging evidence that infants are able to process unstressed functional morphemes long before they start to produce them (Gerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990;Gerken & McIntosh, 1993;Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Schweisguth, 2001;Höhle & Weissenborn, 2003;Santelmann & Jusczyk, 1998;Shady & Gerken, 1999;Shafer et al, 1998). Furthermore, children from 2 years on can use contextual cues given by functional elements to syntactically categorize nouns and adjectives (Eyer et al, 2002;Gelman & Markman, 1985;Taylor & Gelman, 1988).…”

Increasing Flexibility in Children's Online Processing of Grammatical and Nonce Determiners in Fluent Speech

“…The low salience of function words was one reason why early investigators proposed that infants might simply fail to perceive or represent determiners in the speech they heard (Shipley et al, 1969). But when asked to imitate sentences that contained either English function words and morphemes or phonologically comparable nonce words and morphemes, 2-year-olds were more likely to omit the familiar grammatical words while preserving the nonce words, indicating that they could indeed distinguish among them (Gerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990). One explanation is that children's frequent omissions of determiners in spontaneous speech results from phonological limitations or difficulty in mastering the timing relations in speech production (e.g., Gerken, 1994a, b).…”