scholarly journals The effect of frequency and phonological neighbourhood density on the acquisition of past tense verbs by Finnish children

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minna Kirjavainen, ◽  
Alexandre Nikolaev, ◽  
Evan Kidd,
Keyword(s):  
Emergent Property ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Associative Mechanism ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Elicitation Study ◽  
Item Level ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Report Data

AbstractThe acquisition of the past tense has received substantial attention in the psycholinguistics literature, yet most studies report data from English or closely related Indo-European languages. We report on a past tense elicitation study on 136 4–6-year-old children that were acquiring a highly inflected Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language—Finnish. The children were tested on real and novel verbs (N = 120) exhibiting (1) productive, (2) semi-productive, or (3) non-productive inflectional processes manipulated for frequency and phonological neighbourhood density (PND). We found that Finnish children are sensitive to lemma/base frequency and PND when processing inflected words, suggesting that even though children were using suffixation processes, they were also paying attention to the item level properties of the past tense verbs. This paper contributes to the growing body of research suggesting a single analogical/associative mechanism is sufficient in processing both productive (i.e., regular-like) and non-productive (i.e., irregular-like) words. We argue that seemingly rule-like elements in inflectional morphology are an emergent property of the lexicon.

scholarly journals Overregularization in English plural and past tense inflectional morphology: a response to Marcus (1995)

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 767-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIRGINIA A. MARCHMAN ◽  
KIM PLUNKETT ◽  
JUDITH GOODMAN
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Trajectories ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Parental Report ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Regular Class ◽  
Item Level ◽  
Report Data ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Irregular Verbs

In a recent note, Marcus (1995) suggests that the rate of overregularization of English irregular plural nouns is not substantively different from that of English irregular past tense verbs. This finding is claimed to be in conflict with the predictions of connectionist models (Plunkett & Marchman, 1991, 1993) which are said to depend solely on the dominance of regular over irregular forms in determining overregulation errors. However, these conclusions may be premature given that Marcus averaged overregulation rates across irregular nominal forms that varied in token frequency and across samples representing a broad range of children's ages. A connectionist view would predict an interplay between type frequency and other item level factors, e.g. token frequency, as well as differences in the developmental trajectories of the acquisition of nouns and verbs. In this response, we briefly review longitudinal parental report data (N=26) which indicate that children are significantly more likely to produce noun overregularizations than verb overregularizations across a prescribed age period (1;5 to 2;6). At the same time, these data also show that children are familiar with proportionately more irregular nouns than irregular verbs. These findings are consistent with the predictions of Plunkett & Marchman (1991, 1993) in that the larger regular class affects the frequency of noun errors but also that familiarity with individual irregular nouns tends to reduce the likelihood of overregularizations. In contrast to the conclusion of Marcus (1995), the connectionist approach to English inflectional morphology provides a plausible explanation of the phenomenon of overregularization in both the English plural and past tense systems.

scholarly journals Inflectional Morphology in Fluent Aphasia: A Case Study in a Highly Inflected Language

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noémie Auclair-Ouellet ◽  
Pauline Pythoud ◽  
Monica Koenig-Bruhin ◽  
Marion Fossard
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairments ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Inflected Form ◽  
Conceptual Semantic ◽  
Fluent Aphasia ◽  
Irregular Verbs ◽  
Time Information

Inflectional morphology difficulties are typically reported in non-fluent aphasia with agrammatism, but a growing number of studies show that they can also be present in fluent aphasia. In agrammatism, morphological difficulties are conceived as the consequence of impaired phonological encoding and would affect regular verbs more than irregular verbs. However, studies show that inflectional morphology difficulties concern both regular and irregular verbs, and that their origin could be more conceptual/semantic in nature. Additionally, studies report more pronounced impairments for the processing of the past tense compared to other tenses. The goal of this study was to characterize the impairment of inflectional morphology in fluent aphasia. RY, a 69-year-old man with chronic fluent aphasia completed a short neuropsychological and language battery and three experimental tasks of inflectional morphology. The tasks assessed the capacity to select the correct inflected form of a verb based on time information, to access the time information included in an inflectional morpheme, and to produce verbs with tense inflection. His performance was compared to a group of five adults without language impairments. Results showed that RY had difficulties selecting the correct inflected form of a verb, accessing time information transmitted by inflectional morphemes, and producing inflected verbs. His difficulties affected both regular and irregular verbs, and verbs in the present, past, and future tenses. The performance also shows the influence of processing limitations over the production and comprehension of inflectional morphology. More studies of inflectional morphology in fluent aphasia are needed to understand the origin of difficulties.

scholarly journals Evidence of an evolutionary precursor to human language affixation in a non-human primate

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 749-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ansgar D. Endress ◽  
Donal Cahill ◽  
Stefanie Block ◽  
Jeffrey Watumull ◽  
Marc D. Hauser
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Playback Experiments ◽  
Saguinus Oedipus ◽  
Grammatical Competence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Linguistic Functions ◽  
Tamarin Monkeys ◽  
Human Primate

Human language, and grammatical competence in particular, relies on a set of computational operations that, in its entirety, is not observed in other animals. Such uniqueness leaves open the possibility that components of our linguistic competence are shared with other animals, having evolved for non-linguistic functions. Here, we explore this problem from a comparative perspective, asking whether cotton-top tamarin monkeys ( Saguinus oedipus ) can spontaneously (no training) acquire an affixation rule that shares important properties with our inflectional morphology (e.g. the rule that adds –ed to create the past tense, as in the transformation of walk into walk-ed ). Using playback experiments, we show that tamarins discriminate between bisyllabic items that start with a specific ‘prefix’ syllable and those that end with the same syllable as a ‘suffix’. These results suggest that some of the computational mechanisms subserving affixation in a diversity of languages are shared with other animals, relying on basic perceptual or memory primitives that evolved for non-linguistic functions.

scholarly journals Malayalam Morphosyntax: Inflectional Features and their Acquisition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayathri Krishnan
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lexical Feature ◽  
Marker Selection ◽  
Dative Subject ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Case Number ◽  
Selection Of

Malayalam, which belongs to the South-Dravidian language family, is an agglutinative language with rich inflectional morphology. The aim of the thesis is to analyse the grammar and acquisition of Malayalam verbal inflections (tense, aspect and mood) and nominal inflections (case, number, and gender). Within the larger discussion of inflectional morphology and its acquisition, particular attention is paid to two complex morphological processes, a) the past tense formation of verbs and b) case assignment of subjects and objects.In particular, the thesis will show the following: a) that the past tense marker selection is determined by different grammatical principles in underived and derived stems; specifically, phonotactics in the former and the lexical feature of transitivity in the latter; b) that the dative nominals of a class of predicates (variously labelled experiencer or dative subject or psych predicates) are in fact subjects using an array of empirical tests involving binding, control, accusative marking, and predicate alternation; and c) that inflections for number and object case rest on lexical features of the noun (stem) and the allomorphy is governed by these featural requirements. In looking at the developing grammar in the two subjects, the thesis will show that Malayalam inflectional grammar has quite direct consequences for the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Specifically, acquisition proceeds unobstructed when the mode of selection is phonological and offers more challenges when the mode of selection is morphological, i.e., when the selection depends on the learning of the lexical or grammatical features of the noun and verb stems.Thus, using the interplay between acquisition and the grammatical description, we establish that in addition to the established factors that guide acquisition, mode of selection of an inflection plays a key role in determining the relative ease/difficulty in the acquisition of inflectional morphology. This follows quite neatly from the fact that children are phonologically competent even before much language is produced and that this module-competence could facilitate the acquisition of morphology. The thesis will argue that this is indeed the case.

scholarly journals Malayalam Morphosyntax: Inflectional Features and their Acquisition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayathri Krishnan
Keyword(s):  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
The Past ◽  
Lexical Feature ◽  
Marker Selection ◽  
Dative Subject ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Case Number ◽  
Selection Of

Malayalam, which belongs to the South-Dravidian language family, is an agglutinative language with rich inflectional morphology. The aim of the thesis is to analyse the grammar and acquisition of Malayalam verbal inflections (tense, aspect and mood) and nominal inflections (case, number, and gender). Within the larger discussion of inflectional morphology and its acquisition, particular attention is paid to two complex morphological processes, a) the past tense formation of verbs and b) case assignment of subjects and objects.In particular, the thesis will show the following: a) that the past tense marker selection is determined by different grammatical principles in underived and derived stems; specifically, phonotactics in the former and the lexical feature of transitivity in the latter; b) that the dative nominals of a class of predicates (variously labelled experiencer or dative subject or psych predicates) are in fact subjects using an array of empirical tests involving binding, control, accusative marking, and predicate alternation; and c) that inflections for number and object case rest on lexical features of the noun (stem) and the allomorphy is governed by these featural requirements. In looking at the developing grammar in the two subjects, the thesis will show that Malayalam inflectional grammar has quite direct consequences for the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Specifically, acquisition proceeds unobstructed when the mode of selection is phonological and offers more challenges when the mode of selection is morphological, i.e., when the selection depends on the learning of the lexical or grammatical features of the noun and verb stems.Thus, using the interplay between acquisition and the grammatical description, we establish that in addition to the established factors that guide acquisition, mode of selection of an inflection plays a key role in determining the relative ease/difficulty in the acquisition of inflectional morphology. This follows quite neatly from the fact that children are phonologically competent even before much language is produced and that this module-competence could facilitate the acquisition of morphology. The thesis will argue that this is indeed the case.

scholarly journals The acquisition of past tense morphology in Icelandic and Norwegian children: an experimental study

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
HRAFNHILDUR RAGNARSDÓTTIR ◽  
HANNE GRAM SIMONSEN ◽  
KIM PLUNKETT
Keyword(s):  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
The Other ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Sectional Study ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Coherence Factors

Icelandic and Norwegian past tense morphology contain strong patterns of inflection and two weak patterns of inflection. We report the results of an elicitation task that tests Icelandic and Norwegian children's knowledge of the past tense forms of a representative sample of verbs. This cross-sectional study of four-, six- and eight-year-old Icelandic (n=92) and Norwegian (n=96) children systematically manipulates verb characteristics such as type frequency, token frequency and phonological coherence – factors that are generally considered to have an important impact on the acquisition of inflectional morphology in other languages. Our findings confirm that these factors play an important role in the acquisition of Icelandic and Norwegian. In addition, the results indicate that the predominant source of errors in children shifts during the later stages of development from one weak verb class to the other. We conclude that these findings are consistent with the view that exemplar-based learning, whereby patterns of categorization and generalization are driven by similarity to known forms, appropriately characterizes the acquisition of inflectional systems by Icelandic and Norwegian children.

Preverbation and narrativity in Lithuanian. The distribution of finite simplex and compound verbs in narrative main clauses

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Text ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Compound Verbs ◽  
Finite Verb

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  

SYSTEM OF PARTICIPLES IN THE OSSETIAN LANGUAGE COMPARED TO THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
З.И. Годизова ◽  
Д.В. Габисова
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Language Family ◽  
European Language ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Imperfective Aspect ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Russian Language ◽  
Conversion Transition

Актуальность предпринятого исследования обусловлена тем, что причастие в современном осетинском языке не привлекало активного внимания ученых, имеются лишь общие описания причастий, а специальные исследования, посвященные причастиям, практически отсутствуют. Представляется интересным и актуальным сравнение системы причастий и их грамматических особенностей в осетинском и русском языках. Этот интерес обусловлен принадлежностью сопоставляемых языков к общей индоевропейской семье языков, а также тесным их взаимодействием в условиях двуязычия, что, очевидно, может отразиться и на системе причастий. Научная новизна данной статьи заключается в том, что в ней исследуются грамматические особенности всех разрядов причастий в осетинском языке в сопоставлении с русским языком. На основании проведенного анализа установлено, что в современном осетинском языке система причастий включает пять разрядов, разнообразных в своих грамматических проявлениях, в степени регулярности, в склонности переходить в состав других частей речи. Выявлены наиболее значительные отличия осетинских причастий от русских: существование причастий будущего времени в системе осетинского языка, отсутствие у причастий показателей времени и залога, а также именных грамматических категорий (падежа, числа, рода). Установлено также, что в осетинском языке категория вида в большей степени управляет категорией времени, в силу чего несовершенный вид причастий предполагает только настоящее время, а совершенный только прошедшее отсутствует четкая залоговая оппозиция причастий в осетинском языке. Определено также, что осетинские причастия не имеют членных (полных) форм, но функционируют в роли и сказуемого, и определения, хотя в большей степени тяготеют к предикативной роли. В осетинском языке причастия гораздо менее употребительны сравнительно с причастиями в русском языке и чаще вступают в отношения грамматической омонимии с другими частями речи. The relevance of the undertaken study is determined by the fact that participles in the modern Ossetian language are still insufficiently studied. There are only the most general descriptions of grammar features of participles. The comparison of the system of participles and their grammar features seems interesting and actual, especially considering the fact that the Ossetian and Russian languages belong to different groups of the Indo-European language family. Furthermore, in the context of bilingualism the Russian and Ossetian languages interact actively and that can affect the system of participles. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the fact that it examines the grammatical features of all categories of participles in the Ossetian language in comparison with the Russian language. The conducted research allowed to elicit five categories in the system of participles in the modern Ossetian language. The analysis of the results showed the participles are diverse in their grammatical characteristics, in the degree of regularity, and in the tendency to transition into other parts of speech. The research defined the most significant differences between Ossetian and Russian participles: existence of future participles in the system of the Ossetian language absence of adjectival grammar categories of gender, number and case as well as formal markers of tense and voice in Ossetian participles. The tense category in Ossetian subordinates to the aspect category to a far greater extent therefore the imperfective aspect of participles accepts the present tense forms only, while perfective acts in the past tense forms Ossetian participles lack explicit voice opposition. Ossetian participles do not have full forms, but they can have syntactic functions of both the predicate and the attribute in a sentence, although the predicative function is more typical for them. Participles in the Ossetian language are much less common compared to participles in Russian and are more disposed to conversion (transition to the category of nouns, verbal adverbs, adjectives, words of the state category).

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