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Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately run into significant difficulties – difficulties that illustrate the utility of abstractions. I conclude with a brief review of modern symbolic approaches that address the concerns Ambridge raises about abstractions.

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build links between these other parts of language and their meaning. Here, we investigated the acquisition of morphology in infants learning Italian, a language with a rich inflectional morphology that marks both gender and number on both the article and final vowel of nouns. We demonstrate that infants can build these links between concepts and morphological regularities much earlier than previously thought. Italian-learning 12-18- and 24-month-olds were shown pairs of images of faces that differed either in number (1 female vs. 2 females; 1 male vs. 2 males) or gender (1 female vs. 1 male; 2 females vs. 2 males). On each trial infants were directed to look at one of the images with the morphological regularities as the only distinguishing cue. Overall, across all ages, the infants looked to the labeled image, indicating that they had at least some understanding of the morphology. While infants succeeded on both gender comparisons, they only showed evidence of understanding the feminine number distinction. These results indicate that in the early stages of language acquisition, infants are able to identify recurring morphemes and to map those morphological regularities to the concepts that they mark in the language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive inflection in child-directed speech, the child overwhelmingly produces a possessive construction that circumvents this morphology. This construction, named here the equational possessive strategy (EPS), is largely undescribed in existing literature but is the primary mechanism for the child to express possession. These findings have potential implications for the cross-linguistic acquisition of possessive morphology and the connections between child-directed speech and child language production.

Our research on variation in the expression of grammatical gender (in determiners and adnominal inflection) in present-day ethnolectal Dutch is based on interactional speech data collected among 10–12 and 18–20-year-old male adolescents with Turkish, Moroccan and non-immigrant Dutch backgrounds, born and raised in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam or Nijmegen. The cities, which both have multicultural demographic profiles, are located in different dialect areas. In the data, the realization of neuter gender appears to vary greatly; in our analyses of this variation linguistic and social parameters were included. With regard to the language-internal conditioning, grammatical and semantic dimensions have been taken into account. Apart from the speakers’ age and city of residence, the social dimensions also include background of both the speaker and the interlocutor. The outcomes shed light on three aspects. As regards conditioning factors, L1 substrates, processes of L2 acquisition of the first generations of migrants, and surrounding regional variation all play a role. As regards the place of ethnolectal variation in the speakers’ verbal repertoires, we found evidence for a stylistic role of variable gender assignment in determiners. Our data do not support the hypothesis of the cross-over of ethnolectal changes in Dutch grammatical gender marking to speakers without an immigrant background.

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish‐conforming pseudo‐words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants' inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single‐route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual‐route models). While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish-conforming pseudo-words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants’ inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single-route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual-route models).

First-language acquisition of morphology refers to the process whereby native speakers gain full and automatic command of the inflectional and derivational machinery of their mother tongue. Despite language diversity, evidence shows that morphological acquisition follows a shared path in development in evolving from semantically and structurally simplex and non-productive to more complex and productive. The emergence and consolidation of the central morphological systems in a language typically take place between the ages of two and six years, while mature command of all systems and subsystems can take up to 10 more years, and is mediated by the consolidation of literacy skills. Morphological learning in both inflection and derivation is always interwoven with lexical growth, and derivational acquisition is highly dependent on the development of a large and coherent lexicon. Three critical factors platform the acquisition of morphology. One factor is the input patterns in the ambient language, including various types of frequency. Input provides the context for children to pay attention to morphological markers as meaningful cues to caregivers’ intentions in interactive sociopragmatic settings of joint attention. A second factor is language typology, given that languages differ in the amount of word-internal information they package in words. The “typological impact” in morphology directs children to the ways pertinent conceptual and structural information is encoded in morphological structures. It is thus responsible for great differences among languages in the timing and pace of learning morphological categories such as passive verbs. Finally, development itself is a central mechanism that drives morphological acquisition from emergence to productivity in three senses: as the filtering device that enables the break into the morphological system, in providing the span of time necessary for the consolidation of morphological systems in children, and in hosting the cognitive changes that usher in mature morphological systems in both speech and writing in adolescents and adults.

This study investigates a low-frequency verbal inflection called the “narrative past” in child and child-directed speech in the Bantu language Sesotho. Since the function of the Sesotho narrative past is not well-described, this study aimed to illuminate both function and acquisition trends in the Demuth Sesotho Corpus (Demuth, 1992). The narrative past form has been assumed to be under-specified for tense, comparable in function to the better-known Swahili -ka- inflection. The Swahili form, in turn, has been said to function in “clause chains” that are functionally and structurally similar to such chains in Papuan and other languages. We expected that, if the Sesotho narrative past is indeed functionally similar to Swahili -ka-, its distribution in child-directed speech and acquisition by children may pattern similarly to tense-less verb forms in non-Bantu clause chaining languages such as the Papuan language Nungon, where such verb forms can comprise over 20% of all verb tokens in child-directed and child speech at age 3;3. This study thus examined the conversational interactions of four children acquiring Sesotho in a village setting, aged 2;1–4;7. All 492 tokens of the narrative past form were coded for syntactic and discourse categories. Results show that the Sesotho narrative past generally occurs in much “looser” discourse chains than the clause chains of languages like Nungon; for Sesotho, other turns or elements can intervene between narrative past-framed mentions of previously-introduced topics. Further, the Sesotho narrative past has very low frequency in both child and child-directed speech, representing

According to the Integration of Multiple Patterns hypothesis (IMP; Treiman & Kessler, 2014), the spelling difficulty of a word is affected by the number of cues converging on the correct answer. We tested this hypothesis in children’s regular past tense formation in Dutch. Past tenses are formed by adding either-de or-te to a verb stem. Despite instruction, children often choose the wrong allograph. In a large dataset (227 items, together completed 392,802 times) from an online language program we assessed whether morphophonological and orthographic cues determine differences in difficulty and explain error patterns. Regression analyses established that inflection difficulty was affected by number of converging cues, especially morphophonological and orthographic cues. Error analyses further showed that allograph errors were prominent when graphotactic frequency and especially voicing probability collided with the correct answer. The results match and specify the IMP. Proposals are made to use this knowledge in educational practice.

Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of comprehension of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood, & Carey, 2006). The goal of the present study was to reexamine this issue using a phonologically and morphologically controlled set of stimuli. The results show that 24-month-olds do demonstrate understanding of nominal plural morphology, but only for the voiceless plural allomorph /s/, not /z/. Further study suggests that this result is not driven by input frequency, but rather by the longer duration of the /s/allomorph, which may enhance its perceptual salience. The implications for learning grammar more generally are discussed.

The present study has as object of study the tense category in the interlanguage Portuguese-Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) produced by deaf people, in the process of acquisition of Portuguese written as L2. This study comes from the need to investigate the characteristics of this category, verifying to what extent this interlingua presents aspects of the native and target languages or aspects of none of them, considering the limitation of deaf individuals in acquiring the oral language phonological system, since it is sonorous. We also consider in this investigation that such limitation has consequences for the acquisition of the written modality of this type of language by these individuals, also concerning the morphosyntactic module. The scholars of the area have called interlanguage the type of language acquired as L2, considering this an intermediate system between the target language and the mother language. In light of this, the corpus of this research was formed from what we can treat as interlanguage Portuguese-Libras. The analysis of the phenomenon of acquisition of the tense category investigated here was based on the generative theoretical framework (CHOMSKY, 1995), assuming the existence of a Universal Grammar (UG) and assuming theinnatist proposition of language acquisition. Based on these assumptions, we start from the following questions about the acquisition of the tense category in Portuguese written as L2 by deaf people: (1) Is there interference of Libras in the written production of Portuguese, indicating indirect access to UG? (2) How do you characterize the acquisition, by deaf people, of the tense category in written Portuguese? As a possibility of answer to these questions, we assume the indirect access to GU, assuming that the deaf show in their written productions of Portuguese, besides verbal inflection, as in the target language (Portuguese), also, under certain circumstances, a type of tense marking via specific lexical temporal marker or via adverbial category, similar to what occurs in their native language (Libras). The data that compose this corpus were collected through written samples of interlanguage production in Portuguese-Libras produced by seven subject-informants, deaf students from Elementary School II, High School and a subject-informant with completed High School, all of them students of the Abdias Menezes State School, in the Municipality of Vitoria da Conquista - BA. Mixed aspects of the methodology of constitution of the corpus of this study characterize it as transversal by the cut realized and naturalistic by the type of sample. The results of this research indicate the occurrence in the interlanguage of specific temporal operators - lexical items past and future, as well as adverbs.By marking past tense, we observed a occurrence of lexical operator in non-punctual verbal aspects and the dispensation of this in cases of verbs with perfective aspect, as occurs in Libras, which according to a study by Silva (2015), characterizes indirect access to GU in the process of acquisition of L2, confirming our hypothesis. The subject-informants also presented in the written productions temporal flexion according to the parameters of the Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as well as the accomplishment of auxiliary verbs, marking the future time.

Morphology, the science of words, is a complex theoretical landscape, where a multitude of frameworks, each with their own tenets and formalism, compete for the explanation of linguistic facts. The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory is a comprehensive guide through this jungle of morphological theories. It provides a rich and up-to-date overview of theoretical frameworks, from Structuralism to Optimality Theory and from Minimalism to Construction Morphology. In the core part of the handbook (Part II), each theory is introduced by a practitioner, who guides the reader through its principles and technicalities, its advantages and disadvantages. All chapters are written to be accessible, authoritative, and critical. Cross-references reveal agreements and disagreements among frameworks, and a rich body of references encourages further reading. As well as introducing individual theories, the volume speaks to the bigger picture. Part I identifies time-honoured issues in word-formation and inflection that have set the theoretical scene. Part III connects morphological theory to other fields of linguistics. These include typology and creole linguistics, diachronic change and synchronic variation, first and second language acquisition, psycho-/neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and sign language theory. Each of these fields informs and challenges morphological theory in particular ways. By linking specialist data and insights from the various subfields, the volume fosters the dialogue among sub-disciplines that is much needed for a graceful integration of linguistic thinking.

This chapter reviews findings from the field of first language acquisition that shed light on morphological theory. The focus is on the acquisition of multimorphemic words and the distinction between regular and irregular inflection. The first aim of the chapter is to show that child data should always be interpreted against the background of developments in other areas that may influence children’s morphological performance. Child data have played a role in the debate about single versus dual route processing, which overlaps in part with the theoretical distinction between full and impoverished lexical entries. The second aim of the chapter is to provide a balanced overview of the empirical arguments that may support these different theoretical views. Specific attention is paid to the interpretation of developmental errors, languages other than English, and patterns observed in atypical language learners.

Language learning/use is a very delicate task. When a learner/user of a given language is confronted with a difficulty, he/she is forced to create to communicate. This can be observed in most New Englishes. Those varieties of English abound in neologisms and local languages items. From an interlanguage frame, this study looks at some neologisms and Cameroonisms in Cameroon English (CamE) / Cameroon Francophone English (CamFE). The data come from debates on national radio stations and TV channels, conversations among students and university lecturers on university campuses across Cameroon, casual encounters such as public gatherings or during journeys, and from students’ essays. The findings show that, in CamE, most neologisms come from Pidgin English or French while Cameroonisms come from local languages, the inflection of some English words and skilful combination of some English structures. In CamFE, most neologisms come from French and Cameroonisms from home languages and code mixing.

Morphological analyses usually prefer ‘deriving’ form-identities as systematic syncretism over just stating them in terms of accidental homophony. While such anti-homophony is mostly assumed implicitly, Muller (2004) spells it out more explicitly as violable Syncretism Principle guiding both language acquisition and linguistic analysis (‘same form → same meaning’). However, as soon as the child or linguist decomposes word forms into smaller formatives (morpheme segmentation, subanalysis), it is unclear what instances of form-identity exactly are to be avoided (e.g. substring-identities?). This paper frames the logical space of possible Syncretism Principle interpretations, which relate to their functional motivation (ambiguity avoidance) demonstrating their concrete consequences for analysis with a paradigm learning algorithm offering segmentation and meaning assignment.

This article investigates the relationship between third person singular present tense agreement morphemes, copula is and verb-s, at 2;00 and 2;03. Language samples from 60 children at 2;00 were analyzed for the productivity of copula is as measured by the number of different morphemes preceding is in children’s sentences. Samples at 2;03 were analyzed for the number of different verb stems affixed with –s or marked with verb past inflection. Concurrent control measures of vocabulary and MLU were obtained at 2;03. Two hierarchical multiple regressions were performed to determine whether there was a relationship between 2;00 copula is and 2;03 verb inflection. Each regression had a different 2;03 verb inflectional category, verb-s or verb past, as its dependent variable. The results of the verb-s regression showed that both MLU and copula is productivity accounted for significant portions of unique variance in 2;03 verb-s productivity. In contrast, the results of the verb past regression revealed t...

Imageability is the ability of words to elicit mental sensory images of their referents. Recent research has suggested that imageability facilitates the processing and acquisition of inflected word forms. The present study examined whether inflected word forms are acquired earlier in highly imageable words in Czech children. Parents of 317 children (mean age 28 months) were asked whether their child used specific forms of 63 nouns and 35 verbs. For nouns, the forms were nominative singular and plural; for verbs, third person singular present, second person singular present, and the past participle. Plural nouns, and second person and past participle verbs were considered the marked, inflected forms. Analyses revealed that imageability is positively related to the use of the inflected form, even when controlling for the use of the unmarked form in each child, and the inflected form frequency. Two main explanations are suggested: facilitation of form retrieval from long-term memory, or facilitation of inflected form processing, especially by supporting the representations in working memory.

Objective Grammatical development is shown to be delayed in CI children. However, the literature has focussed mainly on one aspect of grammatical development, either morphology or syntax, and on standard tests instead of spontaneous speech. The aim of the present study was to compare grammatical development in the spontaneous speech of Dutch-speaking children with cochlear implants and normally hearing peers. Both syntagmatic and paradigmatic development will be assessed and compared with each other. Method Nine children with cochlear implants were followed yearly between ages 2 and 7. There was a cross-sectional control group of 10 normally hearing peers at each age. Syntactic development is measured by means of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), morphological development by means of Mean Size of Paradigm (MSP). This last measure is relatively new in child language research. Results MLU and MSP of children with cochlear implants lag behind that of their normally hearing peers up to age 4 and up to age 6 respectively. By age 5, CI children catch up on MSP and by age 7 they caught up on MLU. Conclusion Children with cochlear implants catch up with their normally hearing peers for both measures of syntax and morphology. However, it is shown that inflection is earlier age-appropriate than sentence length in CI children. Possible explanations for this difference in developmental pace are discussed.

Purpose This study reports age 5 morphology and syntax skills in late talkers identified at age 2 ( n = 34) and typically developing comparison children ( n = 20). Results The late talkers manifested significant morphological delays at ages 3 and 4 relative to comparison peers. Based on the 14 morphemes analyzed at age 5, the only significant group difference was on the third person regular – s inflection. This was also the only significant difference when we compared late talkers with continuing delay, late bloomers (who scored within 1 standard deviation of the comparison group in mean length of utterance), and typically developing peers. The late talker and comparison children differed greatly in mean total scores on the Index of Productive Syntax (Scarborough, 1990), a measure of syntactic complexity. The group with continuing delay scored significantly lower on the IPSyn than the late bloomer and typically developing groups, which did not differ from each other. Conclusions Findings are consistent with the higher order language group differences found through adolescence in these late talkers relative to comparison peers with similar socioeconomic status and similar nonverbal abilities, supporting the notion that late talkers have an ongoing weakness in language endowment that manifests differently over the course of development.

To test between two recent accounts of the early stages in the acquisition of negation, we conducted an elicited production study with 25 children, between 2;05 and 3;04 (mean 2;11). The experimental study produced a robust set of negative sentences, with considerable individual variation. Although 13 of the child participants mainly produced adultlike negative sentences with doesn’t, 12 children produced nontarget forms. The nonadult productions included medial negation structures, both with bare verbs (It not fit) and with inflected main verbs (It not fits, It don’t fits), as well as negative sentences with “high” inflection (It’s not fit) and doubling (It’s not fits). Although some of the findings are consistent with the account advanced by Harris & Wexler (1996), their prediction that negative sentences with do-support (It don’t/doesn’t fit) co-occur with medial negation and a bare verb (It not fit) was not borne out. The findings are amenable to the account advanced by Thornton & Tesan (2013), who co...

When analyzing language acquisition of inflective languages like Czech, it is necessary to distinguish between errors in word stems and errors in inflection. We use the data of the learner corpus CzeSL, but we propose a simpler error classification based on levels of language description (orthography, morphonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon), which takes into account the uncertainty about the causes of the error. We present a rule-based automatic annotation tool, which can assist both the task of manual error classification and stochastic automatic error annotation with preliminary results of types of errors related to the language proficiency of the text authors.

The article discusses the important role played input in language acquisition. Topics include the difficulty in obtaining the difference between groups and languages, the visibility of the success of children concerning inflection in their knowledge, and the description of lexical mistake for monolinguals.

This paper is a four page review of the Abridge-Lieven book on child language acquisition. The authors of this impressive book have taken up the challenge of opening a fruitful dialogue between generative and constructivist approaches to child language. Their work makes careful analyses of opposing theories and the results of a great body of research papers in a range of fields (phonology, including both perception and production; word meaning and word learning; grammar acquisition; inflection; simple and complex syntax; binding). The volume presents a remarkable state of the art review and is an outstanding contribution to the field; it will be useful to teachers and students, as well as members of the scientific community. Indeed, whether readers are newcomers to the field of language acquisition, versed in only one theoretical approach, knowledgeable in only one of the domains explored in the book, or seeking to put different theoretical approaches into perspective, they will find enough here to fulfil their needs.

The present study aims to investigate syntactic deficits in 13 Iranian deaf students aged between 17 and 21 years. Four tests in the form of sentence-recognition and sentence-completion were administered to examine their knowledge of verb inflection, derivational morphology, word order, and prepositions. A between-category analysis of errors indicated a significant dissociation between categories, most notably between verb inflection and derivational morphology and between word order as the category with fewest errors and the three others. On theoretical grounds, the fact that subjects have not acquired much syntax even after years of learning seemed to strengthen the significance of acquiring syntax and morphology in the early years.

Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production of inflected nonce verb forms (3rd person singular with -t suffix) with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1–5;1), sixteen TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0–3;11). The findings revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables, replicating the results from English-learning children.

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap verbal-semantic abilities, the two groups showed equivalent phonological skills. Poor comprehenders performed as well as control children when asked to inflect novel verbs and regular verbs. In contrast, poor comprehenders were less skilled than controls at inflecting both high frequency and low frequency irregular verbs. Although the predominant error pattern for all children was to over-regularize, this was most marked in the poor comprehenders; control children were more likely to produce errors that contained knowledge of the irregular form than poor comprehenders. In addition, the ability to inflect irregular verbs was related to individual differences in verbal-semantic skills. These findings are discussed within a framework in which verb inflection is related to underlying language skills in both the phonological and semantic domains.

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 categorisation and generalisation are driven by similarity to known forms, appropriately characterises the acquisition of inflectional systems by Icelandic and Norwegian children. Copyright 1999 Cambridge University Press. Journal of Child Language http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JCL

Affixal inflectional morphology has been intensively examined as a model of productive aspects of language. Nevertheless, little is known about the neurocognition of the learning and generalization of affixal inflection, or the influence of certain factors that may affect these processes. In an event-related fMRI study, we examined the neurocognition of the learning and generalization of plural inflections in an artificial language, as well as the influence of both affix type frequency (the proportion of words receiving a given affix) and affix predictability (based on phonological cues in the stem). Adult participants were trained in three sessions, and were scanned after the first and last sessions while inflecting trained and untrained words. Untrained words yielded more activation than trained words in medial frontal (including pre-SMA) and left inferior frontal cortices, which have previously shown activation in compositional grammatical processing. A reliance on phonological cues for untrained word inflection correlated positively with pre-SMA activation, but negatively with activation in the pars triangularis. Thus, pre-SMA may be involved in phonological cue-based composition, while the pars triangularis underlies alternative processes. Inflecting trained items yielded activation in the caudate head bilaterally, only in the first session, consistent with a role for procedural memory in learning grammatical regularities. The medial frontal and left inferior regions activated by untrained items were also activated by trained items, but more weakly than untrained items, with weakest activation for trained-items taking the high-frequency affix. This suggests less involvement of compositional processes for inflecting trained than untrained items, and least of all for trained inflected forms with high-frequency affixes, consistent with the storage of such forms (e.g., in declarative memory). Overall, the findings further elucidate the neural bases of the learning and generalization of affixal morphology, and the roles of affix type frequency and affix phonological predictability in these processes. Moreover, the results support and further specify the declarative/procedural model, in particular in adult language learning.

This article first outlines different ways of how psycholinguists have dealt with linguistic diversity and illustrates these approaches with three familiar cases from research on language processing, language acquisition, and language disorders. The second part focuses on the role of morphology and morphological variability across languages for psycholinguistic research. The specific phenomena to be examined are to do with stem-formation morphology and inflectional classes; they illustrate how experimental research that is informed by linguistic typology can lead to new insights.

In this study, age of onset (AoO) was investigated in five- and six-year-old bilingual Frisian–Dutch children. AoO to Dutch ranged between zero and four and had a positive effect on Dutch receptive vocabulary size, but hardly influenced the children's accurate use of Dutch inflection. The influence of AoO on vocabulary was more prominent than the influence of exposure. Regarding inflection, the reverse was found. Accuracy at using Frisian inflection emerged as a significant predictor; this transfer effect was modulated by lexical overlap between the two languages. This study shows that ‘the sooner the better’ does not necessarily hold for language development. In fact, for the correct use of inflection, it does not matter whether children start at age zero or four. For rapidly learning words in a new language it may be helpful to first build a substantial vocabulary in the first language before learning a new language.

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past‐tense as its test case. The single‐route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past‐tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual‐route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add ‐ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past‐tense forms. Children (aged 3–4; 5–6; 6–7; 9–10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past‐tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past‐tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single‐route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past‐tense is best explained by a single‐route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.

This study examined object clitic pronouns (OCPs) and verb inflections in twenty-five school-age children with typical development (TD) and twenty children with bilingual language impairment (BLI). MANOVA and ANOVA were used to explore differences according to grade level and language status (TD vs. BLI). Although children with BLI produced higher rates of grammatical errors overall, accuracy on number and gender assignment for OCPs was better for both groups in the higher grades. Although the rate of verb inflection errors did not differ for children with TD and BLI in the lower grades, a significant interaction yielded higher error rates on subject–verb agreement for third person singular and plural inflections in the later grades for children with BLI. Greater accuracy on OCP use in later grades weakens claims that bilingualism exacerbates language impairment. For BLI, whether incomplete acquisition or delayed development is the determining factor for verb inflection errors remains undetermined.

The present work interprets verbal inflection error’s in M’s speech from 1;0.23 to 3;04.30, according to the theorization developed by De Lemos (1982 to 2002). Both regular and irregular verbs are foccused. Two works about portuguese verbal inflection acquisition were remembered: Figueira (1998, 2003) and Perroni-Simões (1976). The last one observed the prevalence of the first conjugation in the child’s errors. She proposed an order for the acquisition of verbal inflection by the children. However, responding just about the prevalence of one of the conjugation classes was to treat the question partially, because language acquisition is a subjectivity process, in which subject and language form an unity. The changes (linguistic and subjective ones) that occur in language acquisiton process are changes of position in a structure, where are present: the other, the language, and the subject him/herself. The outline analysis is offered by theorical model. It is verified in M’s speech that divergent verbal forms came from the speech of the other towards her, what is interpreted as the first position of the child in the structure, marked by the dominance of the child’s speech alienation to the other’s speech. In the second position, caracterized by the dominance of language movement in the child’s speech, errors were also founded in M’s speech. It was observed the movement of linguistics chains, that in a parallelistic game, has given support to changes in the child’s speech. The child’s displacement in the structure, from the first to the second position, is foccused. Verbal inflection error’s have given the investigator the privilege of seeing in the child’s speech the exact point of conversion of the speech of the other into his/her own speech (or in the subject’s speech), as indicated by the theorization developed by De Lemos (1982 to 2002).

It is commonly assumed that patterns of syncretism in inflectional paradigms are restricted in some way. In this article, I show how such restrictions can reflect cognitive constraints on language learning. Namely, I construct a learning algorithm that is biased toward certain types of affix distributions in paradigms, thereby rendering them systematic. In developing this algorithm, I rely on the traditional notions of underspecification and blocking, but recast them in terms of learners' biases toward generalization strategies based on cross-situational intersections and default reasoning. This algorithm allows us to test claims about systematicity of syncretism using typological data and language acquisition studies. In the last part of the article, I present a crosslinguistic survey of verbal agreement paradigms that supports the algorithm's predictions.

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the ‘second language (L2) status factor’ hypothesis (Bardel and Falk, 2007), which proposes that the primacy of the L2 can block the potential positive effects that may be transferable from the first language (L1). This article attempts to extend these hypotheses to the domain of morphosyntax, in relation to the TLA of the properties of grammatical number and gender concord marking on German attributive adjectives; these properties not present in the L1 of Japanese, or the L2 of English. Two further factors are of interest in the current study; first, the performance of the learners according to their L3 and their L2 proficiency levels, a variable not discussed in the above-mentioned studies; and, second, the role that the type of task has on the performance of these learners. Three groups of Japanese native speakers (matched for proficiency within each German group), but with differing English proficiencies, completed a carefully balanced gap-filling task, together with two oral elicitation tasks in the form of games; both of these elicited tokens of adjectival inflection. Initial results offer partial support for weaker versions of the two hypotheses mentioned above. However, neither of the L3 models tested can fully account for the results obtained, which are more consistent with a feature-based account of the organization of grammar in the domain of morphosyntax, such as that of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993). DM is a model for language acquisition which — coupled with a view that the Subset Principle proposed by this account is not observed by non-primary language learners — has recently been proposed to explain the optionality observed in L2 learners’ production (Hawkins et al., 2006). The data presented here suggest that it could be extended to L3 learners’ production.

Two recent studies ( Johnson et al., 2005 , Perez-Leroux, 2005 ) found that English- and Spanish-learning children do not show the ability to use verb inflection as a cue to subject number before the age of 5 to 6 years. These findings suggest an asymmetric development as verb inflections are usually correctly produced before this age. In the present study we investigated whether German 3- to 4-year-olds take advantage of the information provided by the verb inflection in sentence comprehension. In a first study, children's looking behavior at two pictures was measured after presentation of a sentence in which the subject number was coded only by the verb inflection. The results from this study suggest that children's looks reflect correct interpretation of the sentences and thus show their ability to make use of verb inflection. In a second experiment, preferential looking was combined with an additional task in which the children had to point to the matching picture. In this case children did not perform above chance level. Our results underline the relevance that specific task demands have on the performance of children in comprehension testing. These have to be accounted for when interpreting findings on production and comprehension asymmetries in language acquisition.

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in inflectional morphology in the speech of two-year-olds. First written in 1995, and framed within the terms of contemporary syntactic theories, this article argues that cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of children's morphosyntactic errors provide important clues to the source of the errors, in particular whether they are morphological or syntactic in origin. The article takes as its starting point some striking previous findings that children's verb inflection errors are systematically correlated, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, with errors in the use of overt subjects, and with the use of syntactically complex constructions such as wh-questions. The ...