Investigating children's use of English derivational morphology

Stotko, Elaine M.

doi:10.1177/014272379401404255

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…If it's before the age of four or five, then they may be able to notice that these affixes do not impact the stress contour and filter them out of the acquisitional intake. Experimental evidence suggests that knowledge of derivational morphology appears to develop fairly late (well into primary school, where it may be explicitly instructed (Tyler and Nagy 1989;Stotko 1994;McBride-Chang et al 2005;Jarmulowicz et al 2008)). In contrast, children develop knowledge of inflectional morphology much earlier, often using it productively in their own utterances by age three (Brown 1973).…”

Section: The Developmental Trajectorymentioning

confidence: 99%

An argument from acquisition: Comparing English metrical stress representations by how learnable they are from child-directed speech

Pearl

Detrano

2016

Language Acquisition

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It has long been recognized that there is a natural dependence between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition, with the idea that the right knowledge representation enables acquisition to happen as reliably as it does. Given this, a reasonable criterion for a theory of knowledge representation is that it be useful for acquisition, particularly in non-trivial learning situations. We propose quantitative learnability metrics meant to capture how useful a representation is for acquisition. We then apply these metrics to the case study of English metrical stress, a language that is notorious for having non-productive aspects in its grammar and so being non-trivial to learn a productive grammar for. We examine three theories of metrical stress representation, assessing their learnability via these metrics from English child-directed speech at different stages of linguistic development. We find that while all three theories are only somewhat useful at the initial stages of stress acquisition, they are far more useful at later stages and define a grammar able to capture the vast majority of English children's acquisitional intake. Interestingly, we also find that the proposed English grammars in each representational theory are not the grammars most easily learnable from English child-directed speech. Instead, minor changes to each English grammar yield an English-like grammar that is far more learnable, suggesting that these alternative English grammars should be given further theoretical, experimental, and computational consideration. We discuss implications for both theories of representation and theories of acquisition.

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Section: The Developmental Trajectorymentioning

confidence: 99%

An argument from acquisition: Comparing English metrical stress representations by how learnable they are from child-directed speech

Pearl

Detrano

2016

Language Acquisition

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show abstract

“…But when do children acquire knowledge of productive English a xes, and is it early enough that they're likely to use this knowledge when acquiring the English metrical phonology grammar? While knowledge of derivational morphology appears to develop fairly late (well into primary school, where it may be explicitly instructed (Tyler and Nagy 1989;Stotko 1994;McBride-Chang et al 2005;Jarmulowicz et al 2008)), children develop knowledge of inflectional morphology much earlier, often using it productively in their own utterances by age three (Brown 1973). Given their own usage of inflectional morphology, it is possible that children have noticed by this age that inflectional morphology is not stressed and rarely alters the stress on a word.…”

Section: Intermediate Knowledge Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%