The Growth of Tense Productivity

Abstract

Acceleration and variation about this trend are consistent with maturational models of language acquisition. With an empirically sound characterization of early variation in morphosyntactic growth rates, future investigations can more rigorously test hypotheses regarding biological, environmental, and developmental contributions to the acquisition of morphosyntax.

Toy Talk: Simple Strategies to Create Richer Grammatical Input

“…That is, children learning Spanish and French master tense marking at earlier ages than children learning English. Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, and Bahnsen (2011) examined individual differences in parents' input informativeness for tense marking and its prediction of between-child differences in the growth of tense productivity, that is, developmental change in sufficiently different uses of tense/agreement morphemes between 21 and 30 months of age (see Hadley & Short, 2005;Rispoli, Hadley, & Holt, 2009). Importantly, this study focused on differences between parents who all spoke the same language (i.e., English), rather than input differences resulting from properties of languages (e.g., English vs. Spanish).…”

“…Drawing upon these psycholinguistic findings, Rispoli et al (2009) proposed that frequent use of pronominal subjects and contracted copula-auxiliary forms in parent input might promote children's learning of these combinations as rotes (e.g., it's, that's, you're). In contrast, variability of grammatical subjects in parent input might facilitate morpheme analysis.…”

BE, DO, and Modal Auxiliaries of 3-Year-Old African American English Speakers

“…Child studies involving other English dialects, such as MAE and British English, are often designed to uncover systematic patterns in children's acquisition and use of various grammatical structures (e.g., Balason & Dolloghan, 2002;Brown, 1973;Conti-Ramsden & Jones, 1997;de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973;Hadley & Holt, 2006;Hadley & Rice, 1996;Lahey et al, 1992;Leonard, Camarata, Brown, & Camarata, 2004;Leonard, Camarata, Pawłowska, Brown, & Camarata, 2006, 2008Rescorla & Roberts, 2002;Rice, Hoffman, & Wexler, 2009;Rispoli, Hadley, & Holt, 2009. Not surprisingly, one can find studies of MAE and British English that have investigated children's acquisition and use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries together.…”

Visualizing Syllables: Real-Time Computerized Feedback Within a Speech–Language Intervention

“…Although multisyllabic words versus phrases differ prosodically, this distinction is less critical for children at the single-word stage of development as evident through literature noting the prevalence of rotes and limited scope formulae in early child utterances (cf. Paul et al 2013;Rispoli et al 2009;Pine and Lieven 1993). The 30 multisyllabic targets for each child were divided between two lists of 15, treatment and control, balancing between lists for (a) syllable number, (b) semantic category (e.g., animal, action word, household items), and (c) the Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC; Jakielski et al 2006; see also Morris 2009).…”