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The Role of Parental Input in the Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology
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- Authors
- Issue Date
- 2001
- Citation
- Journal of cognitive science, Vol.2 No.2, pp. 119-143
- 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.
- ISSN
- 1598-2327
- Language
- English
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