Bruce L. Derwing

Language acquisition: Assessing morphological development

Introduction Traditionally, morphology or ‘word-structure analysis’ is divided into two broad areas: inflectional and derivational. A morphological construction normally involves the addition of some ‘meaning modifying element’ (such as a prefix, suffix, infix, or even a separate root) to some ‘basic’ root or stem element which carries the ‘core’ meaning of the resulting combination. The construction type (or associated process) is called inflectional if the resulting word is construed to be a mere ‘paradigmatic variant’ of its base (as when the suffix - s is added to the English noun cat to yield its inflected form cats ), but derivational if the result is construed to represent an entirely ‘different word’ (as when the suffix - er is added to the English verb teach to yield the derived noun teacher ), or when compounds are formed out of two or more roots (e.g. foot + ball = football ). As it happens, the study of morphology in either of these aspects has long been under-represented in the literature, in language acquisition as in psycholinguistics generally, where attention continues to be devoted mainly to questions of (sentence) syntax and (lexical) semantics. As a consequence, though Brown presented a very long chapter on ‘Grammar and the modulation of meaning’ in his influential book (1973), the discussion in that chapter is notable for the relative paucity of data upon which it is based (selected findings from Browns own longitudinal investigation of the famous triumvirate of Adam, Eve and Sarah, supplemented by the main results from Berkos classic ‘ wug ’ study, now a quarter of a century old, and very little else).

Response coincidence analysis as evidence for language acquisition strategies

New analytical techniques were developed for the identification of subject groups based on within-subject patterns of cooccurrences of responses. These “response coincidence analyses” provided an empirical basis for conjectures about stages or strategies in terms of the rules which characterize group performances. The nature of the operative rules was inferred from an analysis of item response similarities within the subject groups. These techniques were applied to a data set originally obtained by Innes (1974) from 120 children (20 at each age from 2 to 7 years), for a study of the acquisition of the English inflectional morphology for pluralization. The results show quite clearly how the pluralization system is acquired and indicate how such data can be used to develop the specification of rules sensitive to psycholinguistic evidence.

More on English vowel shift: the back vowel question

One of the pivotal claims of the generative approach to English phonology is that a rule essentially duplicating the historical changes of the English Great Vowel Shift is a part of the phonological competence of contemporary speakers of the language (Chomsky & Halle 1968). Though experiments designed to test this claim have shown that some of the alternations predicted by such a rule (VSR) are at least marginally productive for speakers, a counter-claim has also been proposed (Moskowitz 1973; Jaeger 1980) that this limited productivity is the result of knowledge of the familiar spelling rule (SR) that relates the ‘long’ vs . ‘short’ pronunciations of the five English vowel letters. A comparison between the phonological and orthographic theories shows that certain back vowel alternations are crucial for distinguishing between them, and that certain others critically distinguish the Chomsky & Halle version of the VSR from the more recent reformulations of Halle (1977) and Halle & Mohanan (1985). A concept formation experiment was therefore conducted to determine which of these back vowel alternations were included in the vowel shift set. The results showed that all of the predictions of the SR were confirmed, whereas all three versions of the VSR were falsified on at least one count. Moreover, data from English spelling–sound regularities also proved to be highly predictive of the gradation of the responses found in this study, lending rather conclusive support to the view that the SR is responsible for all that has been found to be productive about the vowel shift phenomenon.

Grammatical properties of sentences as a basis for concept formation.

A concept-formation study was run using sets of sentences in eight different syntactic patterns as target categories. These were based on all possible combinations of voice (active or passive), mood (declarative or interrogative), and modality (affirmative or negative). Subjects were 32 senior high school students who participated as volunteers in the computer-controlled experiment. Subjects were able to categorize sentences based solely on sentence types rather than semantic content, but an analysis of the errors committed in the course of learning showed that it was the semantic significance of different types rather than pattern differences as such to which a subject responded. The implications of this for grammatical formulations and the interpretation of psychological research were discussed.

Morphological representation in an endangered, polysynthetic language

This article presents the results from an initial psycholinguistic study of patterns of morphological representation in Dene Suliné (Chipewyan), an indigenous and highly endangered language spoken in Northwestern Canada. Our investigation focused on how morphological knowledge in this polysynthetic language is affected across various levels of language attrition by employing a morphological segmentation task and an off-line lexical decision task. We discuss the manner in which these tasks target different aspects of morphological ability and then turn to methodological issues associated with conducting psycholinguistic studies with language users that differ in levels of age, education, literacy, and bilingualism (Dene- English). Finally, we report on the challenges of doing psycholinguistic research outside the confines of a university setting and make some recommendations to other researchers who might wish to undertake similar studies.

Seeking the -ational in derivational morphology

ABSTRACT Background: Derived words have constituted an important bridge between aphasiology and psycholinguistics by addressing the extent to which morphology affects representation and processing in the mind/brain. Aims: Our goal was to assess how properties of whole words and their overlapping substrings affect the manner in which English derivationally suffixed words are recognised and produced. Methods & Procedures: We probed the processing of multimorphemic words containing strings of two derivational suffixes by healthy adult participants, employing both a progressive demasking naming task and a typing task. The progressive demasking paradigm that we employed integrates word recognition and production by requiring that a participant recognises a progressively demasked stimulus and then say it as quickly as possible. The typing task allowed us to focus on segment by segment aspects of processing during production by enabling us to construct per-letter typing times for each region of a word. Outcomes & Results: We found converging influences across the tasks that correspond to the properties of roots, stems, suffixes and suffix strings. Conclusions: We interpret these effects to accord with a perspective that emphasises the dynamic nature of the lexical processing system and massive interconnectivity within it. This has implications for unimpaired processing and for the word processing challenges experienced by people with aphasia.