Effects of age on the acquisition of agreement inflection

Abstract

Table 5 Probabilities of substitution of suffixes -en, )t and -ø (excl. root infinitives)Child L1 a 2% n = 239 3.5% n = 175 0% n = 262 Child L2 Turkish 6% n =194 4% n = 116 0% n = 134 Child L2 Moroccan 5% n =368 9% n = 192 2% n = 272 Adult L2 Turkish 32% n =136 8% n = 83 19% n = 113 Adult L2 Moroccan 24% n = 335 8% n = 188 28% n = 275 a The scores of child L1 are only from 3 to 5 years old population. The 6-year-old group reached ceiling levels for verbal inflection and was therefore not included in the error analysisThe online version of the article can be found under

Infrequent word classes in the speech of two- to seven-year-old children with cochlear implants and their normally hearing peers: A longitudinal study of adjective use

“…Predicative adjectives never take an agreement inflection in Dutch. Prior research on the acquisition of the Dutch adjective morphology shows that typically developing children never over-extend the agreement inflection to predicative adjectives [44][45][46]. This is in line with the pattern observed in our NH corpus.…”

Persistent differences between native speakers and late bilinguals: Evidence from inflectional and derivational processing in older speakers

“…The output of regular inflectional processes, by contrast, are not 'units of storage', but instead result from a grammatical rule that spells out morphosyntactic features, for example, warn + [PAST] → warnte 'warned'. Previous research suggests that the ability to extract inflectional rules from the input is progressively compromised after early childhood and that, as a result, inflection is particularly difficult to acquire for L2 learners, for instance, due to impairments in the representation or use of morphosyntactic features (Blom, Polišenská & Weerman, 2006;Johnson & Newport, 1989;Meisel, 2013;Prévost & White, 2000). Furthermore, Veríssimo et al (published online July 27, 2017) found inflection not to be efficiently deployed in the recognition of morphologically complex word forms when L2 acquisition starts relatively late in life (after the age of around 6 years).…”

Selective Effects of Age of Acquisition on Morphological Priming: Evidence for a Sensitive Period

“…There are indications that pronounced differences between early and late learners can be found in the domain of inflection (e.g., Johnson & Newport 1989;McDonald 2000). In a sentence completion task in Dutch, for example, Blom, Polišenská & Weerman (2006) found that, relatively to child (L1 and L2) learners, adult L2 learners not only omitted inflectional suffixes more frequently but also overgeneralized specific suffixes to inappropriate syntactic contexts. Blom, Polišenská & Weerman proposed that while children can make use of syntactic cues to build nativelike inflectional paradigms (i.e., structured sets of rules that map syntactic features to affixes), late learners create paradigms that are "relatively small" and "underspecified" (p. 333; see also Pinker 1984 for a paradigm-based model of the acquisition of inflection).…”