Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children

Abstract

Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights Stephanie Stokes and Thomas KleeThe University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Paul FletcherUniversity College Cork, Ireland AbstractThis study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive, and the Past Progressive.The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific developmental information is not available in Bangla (which affects research in the areas of speech and language therapy and computational linguistics) and that properties of these verb forms render them suitable for exploring how language typology contributes to the learnability of verb morphology in emerging child language. Children's performance on these forms was assessed through form-specific language elicitation tasks and spontaneous language samples.Three stages of development of verb morphology were identified by consideration of accuracy of production and error types. Keywords 2Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children Language acquisition, language typology, verb morphology, Bengali, Bangla

Development of verb inflections among Bangla‐speaking children with language disorder

“…As expected, performance of the children with LD on the three target verb forms, in comparison with the TD group's scores on the same tasks (Sultana et al 2016), revealed significantly lower scores across all forms (figure 3), which was confirmed by one-way ANOVAs. The differences in performance between the two groups are consistent with cross-linguistic findings on LD that have revealed that children with language difficulties perform poorly on a range of morphosyntactic measures compared with older TD children (e.g., Acarlar and Johnston 2011, on Turkish, Fletcher et al 2005, on Cantonese, Leonard et al 2004, on English and Swedish, Lukács et al 2009.…”

“…(Values for the TD group in these analyses come from the performance of a group of Bangla-speaking TD children on the same tasks, as reported in Sultana et al 2016.) (Values for the TD group in these analyses come from the performance of a group of Bangla-speaking TD children on the same tasks, as reported in Sultana et al 2016.)…”

“…Accuracy and error rates of the children with LD were compared with a group of TD children who were previously clustered in three developmental profiles based on the accuracy rates and error patterns exhibited in present simple, present progressive and past progressive tasks (Sultana et al 2016). Children's accuracy of each form was calculated in percentages instead of raw scores since the number of opportunities varied across tasks.…”

“…As identified in an investigation of TD (Sultana et al 2016), the errors of the LD group consisted of substitutions by non-target forms. As identified in an investigation of TD (Sultana et al 2016), the errors of the LD group consisted of substitutions by non-target forms.…”

“…Sultana et al (2016) had established that the TD children they tested fell into three groups. These were based on both their percentage accuracy scores for each of the target verb forms, and on the degree of conformity between their error strategies and those of their TD counterparts.…”