Comparing different models of the development of verb inflection in early child Spanish

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge of verb inflection is only partially productive is tested by comparing the average number of different inflections per verb in matched samples of child and adult speech. The generativist claim that children's early use of verb inflection is essentially error-free is tested by investigating the rate at which the children made subjectverb agreement errors in different parts of the present tense paradigm. Our results show: 1) that, although even adults ' use of verb inflection in Spanish tends to look somewhat lexically restricted, both children's use of verb inflection was significantly less flexible than that of their caregivers, and 2) that, although the rate at which the two children produced subjectverb agreement errors in their speech was very low, this overall error rate hid a consistent pattern of error in which error rates were substantially higher in low frequency than in high frequency contexts, and substantially higher for low frequency than for high frequency verbs. These results undermine the claim that children's use of verb inflection is fully productive from the earliest observable stages, and are consistent with the constructivist claim that knowledge of verb inflection develops only gradually

Der Erwerb der Verbflexion durch thailändische Immigrantinnen in der Schweiz. Eine Bestandaufnahme.

This article focuses on the acquisition of German verb inflection by native speakers of Thai, an isolated language which has no concept of inflection at all. The acquisition process of German verb morphology is analyzed based on all the verb inflectional affixes found in the corpus consisting of spontaneous utterances in Standard German produced by16 female immigrants living in German-speaking Switzerland. It aims to find out a systematic acquisition order of verb inflectional morphemes and the explanation to this sequence, especially to answer the following four questions: 1) What is the acquisition order of verb inflectional morphemes found in this group of informants 2) Are there any differences between the acquisition of finite and that of non-finite verbs? 3) Are there any differences in the verb morphology acquisition of different types of verbs? 4) Does the acquisition of verb inflection by these informants share more similiarities with the instructed or with the natural acquisition of German as a second language

Lexical relatedness and the lexical entry - a formal unification

Based on the notion of a lexicon with default inheritance, I address the problem of how to provide a template for lexical representations that allows us to capture the relatedness between inflected word forms and canonically derived lexemes within a broadly realizational-inferential model of morphology. To achieve this we need to be able to represent a whole host of intermediate types of lexical relatedness that are much less frequently discussed in the literature. These include transpositions such as deverbal participles, in which a word's morphosyntactic class changes (e.g. verb ⇒ adjective) but no semantic predicate is added to the semantic representation and the derived word remains, in an important sense, a "form" of the base lexeme (e.g. the 'present participle form of the verb'). I propose a model in which morphological properties are inherited by default from syntactic properties and syntactic properties are inherited from semantic properties, such as ontological category (the Default Cascade). Relatedness is defined in terms of a Generalized Paradigm Function (perhaps in reality a relation), a generalization of the Paradigm Function of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump 2001). The GPF has four components which deliver respectively specifications of a morphological form, syntactic properties, semantic representation and a lexemic index (LI) unique to each individuated lexeme in the lexicon. In principle, therefore, the same function delivers derived lexemes as inflected forms. In order to ensure that a newly derived lexeme of a distinct word class can be inflected I assume two additional principles. First, I assume an Inflectional Specifiability Principle, which states that the form component of the GPF (which defines inflected word forms of a lexeme) is dependent on the specification of the lexeme's morpholexical signature, a declaration of the properties that the lexeme is obliged to inflect for (defined by default on the basis of morpholexical class). I then propose a Category Erasure Principle, which states that 'lower' attributes are erased when the GPF introduces a non-trivial change to a 'higher' attribute (e.g. a change to the semantic representation entails erasure of syntactic and morphological information). The required information is then provided by the Default Cascade, unless overridden by specific declarations in the GPF. I show how this model can account for a variety of intermediate types of relatedness which cannot easily be treated as either inflection or derivation, and conclude with a detailed illustration of how the system applies to a particularly interesting type of transposition in the Samoyedic language Sel'kup, in which a noun is transposed to a similitudinal adjective whose form is in paradigmatic opposition to case-marked noun forms, and which is therefore a kind of inflection

Verbal morphology in agrammatic and anomic aphasia: comparison of structured vs. narrative elicitation tasks

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia show difficulty producing verb morphology (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2008). Various tasks ranging from spontaneous speech to constrained sentence level tasks have been used to detail these deficits and various subsets of verb inflections have been tested, resulting in mixed findings (see Lee, Milman, & Thompson, 2008 for review). In studies comparing production of finite (e.g., walks, walked) vs. nonfinite inflection forms (e.g., walking, to walk), agrammatic speakers show omission and substitution of finite tense markings in the face of relatively preserved nonfinite forms (e.g., LaPointe, 1985; Lee et al., 2008). However, little is known about verbal morphology in fluent aphasic speakers. Recently, Bastiaanse (2011) reported that fluent aphasic individuals may also experience greater difficulty with finite compared to nonfinite verbs in spontaneous speech. Despite the frequently observed verb morphology deficits in individuals with aphasia, no assessment tool is available for clinical or research purposes to quantify these deficits. In addition, little attention has been paid to the effects of different elicitation tasks on verb inflection deficits in aphasia. In this study, we examined production of verb inflection in agrammatic and anomic aphasia using two different elicitation methods: structured sentence completion and narrative production tasks. For the structured task, we used the Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI; Lee & Thompson, experimental version), which was developed to assess both finite and nonfinite forms in English, using a sentence completion task. For the narrative task, we used the Cinderella story, one of the most commonly used tasks for eliciting narrative speech samples in aphasia research

Particle verbs and the conditions of projection

In this paper I discuss the properties of particle verbs in light of a proposal about syntactic projection. In section 2 I suggest that projection involves functional structure in two important ways: (i) only functional phrases can be complements, and (ii) lexical heads that take complements and project must be inflected. In section 3, I show that the structure of particle verbs is not uniform with respect to (i) and (ii). On the one hand, a particle always combines with an inflected verb; in this respect, particle verbs look like verb-complement constructions. On the other hand, the particle is not a functional phrase and therefore is not a proper complement, which makes the combination of the particle and the verb look more like a morphologically complex verb. I argue that syntactic rules can in fact interpret the node dominating the particle and the verb as a projection and as a complex head. In section 4, I show that many of the characteristic properties of particle verbs in the Germanic languages follow from the fact that they are structural hybrids

Processing of regular and irregular past tense morphology in highly proficient second language learners of English: a self-paced reading study

Dual-system models suggest that English past tense morphology involves two processing routes: rule application for regular verbs and memory retrieval for irregular verbs (Pinker, 1999). In second language (L2) processing research, Ullman (2001a) suggested that both verb types are retrieved from memory, but more recently Clahsen and Felser (2006) and Ullman (2004) argued that past tense rule application can be automatised with experience by L2 learners. To address this controversy, we tested highly proficient Greek-English learners with naturalistic or classroom L2 exposure compared to native English speakers in a self-paced reading task involving past tense forms embedded in plausible sentences. Our results suggest that, irrespective to the type of exposure, proficient L2 learners of extended L2 exposure apply rule-based processing

GERMAN VERBS IN STUDIO-D A1 BOOK: A MORPHOLOGY ANALYSIS

The study aimed at describing: (1) the patterns of German verbs in Studio- D A1 book, and (2) the function of verbs in German sentences. The object of this study was a lingual unit in the form of German verbs taken from Studio- D A1 book. The techniques of padan and agih (Sudaryanto, 2015) were employed to analyse the data. The former technique incorporated a referential selection, while the latter one used a component division and a markah reading. The findings reveal that the patterns of German verbs were manifested in the forms of action and non-action verbs, were static and dynamic, and underwent inflection and derivation