An Elicited‐Production Study of Inflectional Verb Morphology in Child Finnish

Abstract

Many generativist accounts (e.g., Wexler, 1998) argue for very early knowledge of inflection on the basis of very low rates of person/number marking errors in young children's speech. However, studies of Spanish (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015) and Brazilian Portuguese (Rubino & Pine, 1998) have revealed that these low overall error rates actually hide important differences across the verb paradigm. The present study investigated children's production of person/number marked verbs by eliciting present tense verb forms from 82 native Finnish-speaking children aged 2;2-4;8 years. Four main findings were observed: (a) Rates of person/number marking errors were higher in low-frequency person/number contexts, even excluding children who showed no evidence of having learned the relevant morpheme, (b) most errors involved the use of higher frequency forms in lower frequency person/number contexts, (c) error rates were predicted not only by the frequency of person/number contexts (e.g., 3sg > 2pl) but also by the frequency of individual "ready-inflected" lexical target forms, and (d) for low-frequency verbs, lower error rates were observed for verbs with high phonological neighborhood density. It is concluded that any successful account of the development of verb inflection will need to incorporate both (a) rote-storage and retrieval of individual inflected forms and (b) phonological analogy across them.

A Constructivist Account of Child Language Acquisition

“…Similar findings were reported in a naturalistic-data study of Brazilian Portuguese (Rubino and Pine, 1998), and an elicited production study of Finnish (Räsänen, Ambridge, and Pine, 2014).…”

“…Although its impoverished morphology makes translating such studies into English less than straightforward, when this is done similar findings are obtained (e.g., Theakston, Lieven, and Tomasello, 2003;Theakston, Lieven, Pine, and Rowland, 2005;Theakston and Rowland, 2009;Rowland and Theakston, 2009;Wilson, 2003;Pine, Conti-Ramsden, Joseph, Lieven, and Serratrice, 2008;Räsänen, Ambridge, and Pine, 2014). Neither are such findings restricted to verb morphology.…”

“…Consider, for example, the Finnish present-tense 1sg morpheme -n. Due to the highly regular nature of Finnish morphology, all verbs, regardless of their phonology, take -n in 1sg form. Why, then, are children more likely to supply the correct form for verbs with a large number of phonological neighbors (kerää-n 'I pick up', herää-n 'I wake up') than for verbs that do not (Räsänen, Ambridge, and Pine, 2014; see also Kirjavainen, Nikolaev, and Kidd, 2012, for a similar finding for the Finnish past-tense system)? Why, in a similar vein, are English children more likely to supply a regular -t (orthographically, −ed) past-tense form for real and novel verbs that are similar to several existing regular verbs (kiss/kissed, miss/missed, hiss/hissed, wish/wished) than those that are not (e.g., match) even though all are compatible with the [X]t schema (Marchman, 1997;Marchman, Wulfeck, and Weismer, 1999;Ambridge, 2010;Theakston, Krajewski, Keeble, and Woollams, 2013)?…”

“…Many different non-constructivist accounts of the phenomenon have been proposed, all of which share the assumption that children are failing to mark tense and/or agreement in some formal grammatical sense (e.g., Rizzi, 1994;Radford, 1996;Wexler, 1998;Legate and Yang, 2007). However, none of these accounts can explain the simple finding that the rate of such errors varies dramatically across verbs within a given language (e.g., Freudenthal, Pine, and Gobet, 2010;Räsänen, Ambridge, and Pine, 2014;Ambridge and Lieven, 2011: 152). The constructivist account explains this phenomenon as the result of children rote-learning input strings, and omitting material from the start of utterances (e.g., Does he eat cake?…”

“…Räsänen et al (2014) provided evidence that this is due to a "defaulting" effect whereby children who cannot retrieve a rote-learned 3sg form (e.g., eats) or schema (e.g., [X]s) instead default to the lexical form of the relevant verb with the highest surface frequency: in every case, the "bare" form (e.g., eat). Rasenen et al showed that, across verbs, the higher the proportion of bare vs. 3sg -s forms in a representative input corpus, the higher the rate of "OI" errors vs. correct 3sg -s inflection for that verb.…”