Negative evidence and grammatical morpheme acquisition.

Investigated children's use of negative evidence in language acquisition. Recent research has demonstrated that parents differentially correct children's ungrammatical sentences compared with grammatical sentences through recasts (i.e., negative evidence). This study investigated children's imitations of new grammatical morphemes contained in corrective recasts. These imitations were compared with imitations of grammatical morphemes contained in positive evidence provided by discourse types such as topic continuations. One hour of conversation in 12 23-mo-old children and their mothers was examined. Children were 2 to 3 times more likely to imitate the correct grammatical morpheme after corrective recasts than after any other form of positive evidence. The implications and limitations of these findings for theories of language acquisition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interplay of function morphemes and prosody in early language.

Previous studies have demonstrated that children are aware of the function morphemes in their language despite their failure to produce them. However, none of these studies tested whether children are aware of the linguistic contexts in which particular function morphemes occur. Only if children are aware of such co-occurrence patterns could they use function morphemes to determine the linguistic categories of words and phrases. Young 2-yr-olds demonstrated their awareness of function morpheme co-occurrence patterns by performing better in a picture identification task when the target word was preceded by a grammatical article than an ungrammatical auxiliary. Children who heard the sentences produced in a female voice performed better than those who heard a male voice, and this was especially true for sentences exhibiting the most regular co-occurrence patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A role for Cdc42 in macrophage chemotaxis

Grammatical morphemes, such as articles and auxiliary verbs, provide potentially useful information to language learners. However, children with specific language impairment (SLI) frequently fail to produce grammatical morphemes, raising questions about their sensitivity to them. To address this issue, two experiments were conducted in which 3- to 5-year-old children with SLI and with normally developing language (NL) heard sentences asking them to identify a picture corresponding to a named target word. The target occurred in either a grammatical sentence or one with an incorrectly used grammatical morpheme. In Experiment 1, the picture representing the target occurred with three unrelated distractor pictures. In Experiment 2, distractor sets included pictures that were semantically related to the target. In both studies, the SLI group chose fewer correct pictures when the target followed an incorrectly used morpheme. In Experiment 2, the SLI group chose more semantically related than unrelated distractors. These results suggest that children with SLI are sensitive to grammatical morphemes and that their incorrect picture choices may reflect a failure to maintain the target in memory.     

Development in children's sensitivity to the role of derivations in spelling.

The English orthography represents the units of meaning (morphemes) as well as the units of sound in words. This experiment focused on 6- to 10-year-old children's sensitivity to the role that an understudied group of morphemes, derivations, plays in spelling. We asked children to circle the correct ending out of 3 phonologically plausible options for 2-morpheme words ending in derivations (e.g., lucky) and for 1-morpheme words with the same word-final letter sequence (e.g., study). The older children (approximately 9 years of age) were more likely to complete the endings correctly for derived words than for 1-morpheme words. This effect did not emerge for the younger children (approximately 7 years). These results help to specify the developmental trajectory of children's sensitivity to the role of morphemes in spelling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Function morphemes in young children's speech perception and production.

Function morphemes or functors (e.g., articles and verb inflections) potentially provide children with cues for segmenting speech into constituents, as well as for labeling these constituents (e.g., noun phrase [NP] and verb phrase [VP]). However, the fact that young children often fail to produce functors may indicate that they ignore these cues in early language acquisition. Alternatively, children may be sensitive to functors in perception, but omit them in production. In 3 experiments, 2-year-olds imitated sentences that contained English or non-English functors and that were controlled for both suprasegmental and segmental factors. Children omitted English functors more frequently than non-English functors, indicating perceptual sensitivity to familiar vs unfamiliar elements. The results suggest that children may be able to use functors early in language acquisition to solve the segmentation and labeling problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fourth graders' sensitivity to morphological context in spelling.

An important aspect of spelling development in English involves the child's ability to use morphological context to deal with one-to-many sound-spelling mappings for word endings. One case involves /z/ endings that follow long vowels, where an “s” spelling is required in the case of inflected noun and verb contexts, but an “se” or “ze” spelling is required in the case of noninflected nouns and verbs. The present study examined the ability of good and poor spellers in Grade 4 to capture these morphological distinctions in a pseudoword spelling task. Overall, the good spellers outperformed the poor spellers, and both groups were more sensitive to the inflected–noninflected noun distinction than the inflected–noninflected verb distinction. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic factors in spelling development as well as the necessity of providing due consideration to these factors in spelling instruction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Le phonème initial des noms inanimés et son effet sur l'identification du genre grammatical.

Studied the effects of the initial phoneme (either consonant or vowel) of inanimate nouns, and assessed the predictive value of noun endings relative to gender classes on the speed and accuracy of grammatical gender identification. The effect of category labels used to express choice of gender class on gender identification was also examined. Human subjects: 51 male and female Canadian adults (university students) (French-speaking). Ss were presented with 2 lists of common nouns designating inanimate objects that differed in the type of initial phoneme, the predictive strength of the word ending, and grammatical gender. Ss were asked to identify gender as rapidly as possible, using the un/une ("a") or masculine/feminine categories. The results were evaluated according to the number of errors in gender identification. Statistical tests were used. (English abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward tense as a clinical marker of specific language impairment in English-speaking children

A critical clinical issue is the identification of a clinical marker, a linguistic form or principle that can be shown to be characteristic of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In this paper we evaluate, as candidate clinical markers, a set of morphemes that mark Tense. In English, this includes -s third person singular, -ed regular past, BE, and DO. According to the Extended Optional Infinitive Account (EOI) of Rice, Wexler, and Cleave (1995), this set of morphemes is likely to appear optionally in the grammars of children with SLI at a rate lower than the optionality evident in younger controls. Three groups of preschool children participated: 37 children with SLI, and two control groups, one of 40 MLU-equivalent children and another of 45 age-equivalent children. Three kinds of evidence support the conclusion that a set of morphemes that marks Tense can be considered a clinical marker: (a) low levels of accuracy for the target morphemes for the SLI group relative to either of the two control groups; (b) affectedness for the set of morphemes defined by the linguistic function of Tense, but not for morphemes unrelated to Tense; and (c) a bimodal distribution for Tense-marking morphemes relative to age peers, in which the typical children are at essentially adult levels of the grammar, whereas children in the SLI group were at low (i.e., non-adultlike) levels of performance. The clinical symptoms are evident in omissions of surface forms. Errors of subject-verb agreement and syntactic misuses are rare, showing that, as predicted, children in an EOI stage who are likely to mark Tense optionally at the same time know a great deal about the grammatical properties of finiteness and agreement in the adult grammar. The findings are discussed in terms of alternative accounts of the grammatical limitations of children with SLI and implications for clinical identification.     

Morphological effects in children's spelling of French words.

Examined whether primary school children represent morphological information when spelling French words that have silent-consonant endings (e.g., chat). 57 children (mean age 7.5 yrs) in grade 2 and 55 children (mean age 9.6 yrs) in grade 4 spelled regular, morphological, and deep words. The morphological and deep words differed in the presence or absence of derivatives that revealed the nature of the silent-consonant ending. As expected, regular words were the easiest to spell whereas morphological words (for which the silent consonant could be derived) were easier to spell than were deep words (for which the silent consonant must be memorized). It is concluded that children's linguistic knowledge of morphology made a contribution to their spelling of morphological words that was independent of reading experience, vocabulary, spelling ability (i.e., spelling regular words), and phoneme awareness. The proportion of silent-consonant endings spelled correctly as a function of word type for the entire sample and material in the spelling, morphological awareness, and phoneme awareness tasks are appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Children Learning to Read in English and Dutch.

The authors report on a cross-linguistic investigation of the reading skills of 6- to 11-year-old children of English (an opaque orthography) and of Dutch (a transparent orthography). Dutch children were relatively more accurate and faster than English children of the same age at reading words and nonwords and also faster to complete phoneme deletion tasks, but the language differences were smaller than expected and modified by age. The predictors of individual differences in reading were similar in the 2 languages; phoneme awareness (as measured by accuracy and response time measures) was a significant predictor of reading, whereas rapid naming of colors, animals, and objects was not. The authors conclude that phoneme awareness is a predictor of individual differences in reading skill in transparent as well as opaque orthographies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading Finnish compound words: eye fixations are affected by component morphemes

The role of morphemic processing in reading was investigated in 2 experiments in which participants read sentences as their eye movements were monitored. The target words were 2-morpheme Finnish compound words. In Experiment 1, the length of the component morphemes was varied and word length was held constant, and in Experiment 2, the uniqueness of the initial morpheme was varied and the rated familiarity and length of the word were held constant. The length of the initial morpheme influenced the location of the second fixation on the target word and the pattern of fixation durations (although it had a negligible influence on the gaze duration of the word). The frequency of the initial morpheme influenced the duration of the first fixation on the target word, had a substantial effect on the gaze duration, and also influenced the location of the first and second fixations on the target word. Subsidiary analyses indicated that these effects were unlikely to stem from orthographic factors such as bigram frequency.     

Interference between phonemes during monitoring: Evidence for an interactive activation model of speech perception.

Explored the finding by J. E. Newman and G. S. Dell (see record 1981-00233-001) that the time needed to detect a target phoneme in a phoneme monitoring task increased when the preceding word contained a phoneme similar to the target. In 3 experiments, 58 undergraduates who were native speakers of English monitored auditorily presented sentences and responded as quickly as possible whenever they detected a specified phoneme. Preceding word-initial phonemes, despite being processed more quickly, increased the response latency to the following target phoneme more than did preceding word-medial phonemes. There was also an increase in response latency even when the S could be highly certain that the similar preceding phoneme was not an instance of the target phoneme. It is argued that the interference effects are due to fundamental characteristics of perceptual processing and that more time is needed to categorize the target phoneme. A computer simulation using an interactive activation model of speech perception is presented to demonstrate the plausibility of this explanation. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphology in Spanish- and English-speaking agrammatic patients

To account for cross-linguistic differences in agrammatism, Bates and her colleagues have employed the Competition Model, proposing that the cue validity and cue costs of a grammatical morpheme in a particular language will directly affect how agrammatism is manifested. Using Goodglass et al.'s (1993) Morphosyntax Battery in English and a translated version in Spanish, we analyzed the use of equivalent grammatical structures in production and comprehension by agrammatic speakers of the two languages. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that the relative order of difficulty in both production and comprehension of various grammatical morphemes was the same for both Spanish- and English-speaking agrammatic patients, with two exceptions (1) the Spanish-speaking agrammatics were relatively better at producing subject-verb agreement, and (2) the Spanish speakers were significantly worse at comprehending both active and passive voice sentences. The Competition Model can explain the performance differences regarding subject-verb agreement and comprehension of active voice sentences, but it cannot account for the differences seen in comprehending passive voice sentences.     

An electrophysiological study of infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of English speech

The study explores 10- to 11-month-old infants' sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained for tones that were superimposed on two versions of a story: an Unmodified version containing normal English function morphemes, and a Modified version in which the prosodic and segmental properties of a subset of function morphemes were changed to make them atypical. The 11-month-olds exhibited significantly lower amplitude ERPs to the tones during the Modified story than to the Unmodified story, whereas the 10-month-olds showed no differences. These results suggest that the 11-month-olds discriminated the two versions of the story based on their representations of the phonological properties of English. Further, the tone-probe ERP method can successfully be used to study the development of speech perception in the pre-linguistic infant.     

Identifiers of predominantly Spanish-speaking children with language impairment

The purpose of this study was to identify a set of measures that would discriminate 31 predominantly Spanish-speaking children with normal language (NL children) from 31 children with language impairment (LI children). The LI children were identified as such by experienced, bilingual (Spanish/English), ASHA-certified, speech-language pathologists who were currently seeing the children in their caseloads. Children ranged in age from 5 to 7 years and were matched for age, gender, and school. Additionally, nonverbal cognitive measures assured that they did not differ significantly intellectually. Measures of vocabulary, novel bound-morpheme learning skills, and language form were randomly administered to all children. Further, parents responded to questions about their perceptions of their children's speech and language skills and family history of speech and language problems. A stepwise discriminant analysis indicated that 4 measures discriminated the groups of children with a sensitivity of 91.3% and a specificity of 100% (p < .0001): parental report of the child's speech and language skills, number of errors per T-unit, mean length per T-unit, and family history of speech and language problems. A second discriminant analysis indicated that the sensitivity and specificity could be maintained when only the first 2 measures were included. Confirmatory discriminant analyses of the 2- and 4-measure models indicated that the discriminant accuracy was stable on an independent sample.     

A longitudinal study of the acquisition of language by two German-speaking children with cochlear implants and of their mothers' speech

The development of language in two children with cochlear implants was analyzed using longitudinal data of videorecorded mother-child interactions. Recordings were made over a period of 14 months for child A and over a period of 3 years for child B. At the beginning of data collection the children were 2;11 and 3;7 respectively. Results reveal substantial differences between the two children and their mothers. Child B was slow in acquiring grammar, with vocalizations and non-linguistic communicative behavior persisting. The child also used language in a labeling function. Child B's MLU (mean length of utterance) never exceeded 2.7 morphemes and his syntax remained rudimentary. Child A had a highly imitative style at the beginning, but then progressed to the spontaneous use of multi-word utterances very quickly, reaching an MLU of 5.6 morphemes in less than 2 years. Child A progressed to correct morphology and a fairly complex syntax. The children's mothers differed with respect to their use of exaggerated intonation patterns, repetitions and expansions, the use of labeling, questions, and directives. Results are discussed in terms of the influence of children's information processing styles and mothers' speech input.     

Cochlear implantation of children with minimal open-set speech recognition skills

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the postoperative performance of 12 children who demonstrated some open-set speech recognition skills before receiving a Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant with a view toward expanding the selection criteria for cochlear implant candidacy to include children who derive minimal benefit from amplification. DESIGN: Pre- and postoperative performance of two groups of children were compared. Group 1 consisted of 12 children who demonstrated some open-set speech recognition skills before receiving a Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant (Borderline group). Group 2 consisted of 12 children who demonstrated no open-set speech recognition skills before implantation with a Nucleus device (Traditional group). In all children, candidacy was determined based on preimplant binaural aided performance. For most subjects, the poorer ear was selected for implantation. Mean pre- and postoperative speech recognition scores of the Borderline subjects were compared to determine the benefit provided by their cochlear implants. Secondly, matched-pair analyses were used to compare the mean speech recognition scores obtained by the Borderline and Traditional subjects. RESULTS: The scores of the Borderline group improved significantly on five of six speech recognition measures when 6 mo postoperative scores obtained with the implant were compared with preoperative test scores obtained with hearing aids. By the 12 mo postoperative interval, the scores of the Borderline group had improved significantly (p < 0.05) on all six measures. In contrast, scores obtained by the Traditional group had improved significantly on three of six measures at both the 6 and 12 mo postoperative intervals. Comparison of postoperative test scores revealed that the Borderline group scored significantly higher than the Traditional group on three of six measures at the 6 mo test interval and on six of six measures at the 12 mo test interval (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study indicate that both groups derive significant benefit from their cochlear implants. Although the mean preoperative audiograms for the implanted ears did not differ significantly for the two groups of subjects, members of the Borderline group exhibited significantly better speech recognition skills than the Traditional group during the first year after implantation. These findings suggest that the increased auditory experience of the Borderline subjects positively influenced their performance with a cochlear implant. The authors advocate that the selection criteria used to determine pediatric cochlear implant candidacy be broadened to include consideration of children who demonstrate minimal open-set speech recognition skills.     

The development of phonological awareness in preschool children.

A short-term longitudinal study was carried out on a group of 67 preschool children. At three points in time over a 12-month period, the children were given tests measuring their syllable, rime, and phoneme awareness, speech and language skills, and letter knowledge. In general, children's rime skills developed earlier than their phoneme skills. Structural equation models showed that articulatory skills and syllable and rime awareness predicted later phoneme awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)