An Experimental-Clinical Analysis of Grammatical and Behavioral Distinctions between Verbal Auxiliary and Copula

Abstract

The study was designed to investigate whether auxiliary is and copular is belong to a single response class. Two children acted as subjects. The auxiliary verb was trained, then reversed, and later reinstated in one of the subjects, while the copula was similarly trained, reversed, and reinstated in the other child. Both the auxiliary and the copular sentences were tested on probes. The first subject, who was trained only on the auxiliary, was able to produce the untrained copula. When the auxiliary production was reversed, the copular production also was reversed. Finally, when the auxiliary production was reinstated, the copular production also was reinstated. For the second subject, the auxiliary production was generated, reversed, and reinstated by training, reversing, and reinstating only the copula. These results suggest that the copular and auxiliary is belong to a single response class and training either of them is sufficient to generate the production of both.

Individual Differences in Language Delayed Children's Responses to Direct and Interactive Preschool Instruction

“…Efficacy research on DI for language instruction has clearly documented the value of DI for teaching information in a very specific setting and set of stimuli (e.g., Gottsleben, Tyack, &C Buschini, 1974;Gray & Ryan, 1973;Hegde, 1980;Hegde, Noll, & Pecora, 1979;Weller, 1979). There is also substantial evidence that DI does not teach language in a manner that allows the skills to be generalized outside the training setting (Jeffree, Wheldall, &C Mittler, 1973;Mulac & Tomlinson, 1977;Zwitman &c Sonderman, 1979).…”

Tense and Agreement Morphemes in the Speech of Children With Specific Language Impairment During Intervention: Phase 2

“…The specific morphemes serving as targets have included copula forms (Hegde, 1980;Hegde, Noll, & Pecora, 1979), auxiliary is and are (Ellis Weismer & Murray-Branch, 1989;Leonard, 1975;Wilcox & Leonard, 1978), and present third-person singular -s and past tense -ed (Camarata, Nelson, & Camarata, 1994;Nelson, Camarata, Welsh, Butkovsky, & Camarata, 1996). Several different procedures have been used in these studies, including imitation (Hegde, 1980), modeling (Ellis Weismer & Murray-Branch, 1989), focused stimulation (Culatta & Horn, 1982), and conversational recasting (Camarata & Nelson, 1992). Given the controls used in most of these studies, it would appear that the gains reported can be attributed to intervention effects rather than to extraexperimental factors such as maturation.…”

“…Studies of generalization of tense and agreement morphemes during intervention are rather limited. Early studies suggest that gains in the use of copula forms can be expected following intervention that emphasizes auxiliary is and are forms and vice versa (e.g., Gray & Fygetakis, 1968;Hegde, 1980;Hegde et al, 1979;Leonard, 1974). Of course, copula and auxiliary be forms are phonetically identical.…”

Short-term syntax learning and generalization effects

“…Collection of spontaneous samples continued twice weekly during treatment, using an FM transmitter and tape recorder in each child's home. Opportunities for both copular and auxiliary forms of is and are were counted in order to increase usable data, and because research has indicated that copular and auxiliary forms belong to a single response class (Hegde, 1980;Hegde and McConn, 1981).…”

“…In an investigation of auxiliary and copular is training, two five-year-old language delayed boys studied by Hegde (1980) learned sentence responses within seven sessions of behavioural treatment. Correct production of is where obligatory in three conversational probes following training ranged from 89% to 93%.…”