The Role of Parental Input in the Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology

Abstract

In 1973, Roger Brown documented two interesting patterns on young childrens acquisition of English inflectional suffixes. First, the earliest grammatical marker in childrens speech, the progressive aspect marker -ing ， appears to be used always correctly. In particular, children never use -ing incorrectly with state verbs; for example, they do not produce overgeneralizations like knowing or wanting. Second, Englishspeaking children first use past tense forms with only a small, semantically coherent set of verbs, including dropped, slipped, crashed, and broke, which name events of such brief duration that the event is almost certain to have ended before one can speak" (Brown, 1973, p.334). Some years after Brown s findings , Bloom, Lifter, and Hafitz (1980) provided further evidence that confirms Brown s analyses. They found that the inflections used by young English-speaking children (between ages of 1;10 and 2;4) correlated with the semantic types of verbs: -ing occurred almost exclusively with verbs such as play, ride， and write (durative , nonresultative), whereas the past tense forms occurred with verbs such as find, fall, and break (punctual, resultative). Brown and Bloom et al. s data suggest a picture of early undergeneralization" in the acquisition of inflectional morphology: rather than using tense-aspect markers with all types of verbs, as adults do, children use them more restrictively.