Part 2: Production vs. perception of function morphemes

What is telegraphic speech?

• Dropping grammatical pieces (function words) and keeping the content words only

• “Daddy drive car”

• “We go to store”

• Even when longer stretches, early speech is telegraphic

What is the assumption that children use telegraphic speech?

• Is it because they don’t know about function morphemes?

What studies have investigated how children perceive function morphemes?

• Fake function words vs real function words study - what they sound like

• Is-ing vs can-ing study - how they are related

What studies have investigated how children comprehend function morphemes

• Picture book with common objects study - how it affects comprehension

• French comprehension study - how it affects comprehension 

• Gender used to predict upcoming words study - how it affects comprehension

What is the fake function words vs real function words study - what they sound like

• 13 month olds (but not earlier)

• Two trials:

  • Real function words: the breek, his breek, her breek, their breek, its breek

  • Fake function words: kuh breek, ris breek, ler breek, lier breek, ots breek

• Results: babies listened longer to the real function words

• Younger babies failed at this task

What is the Is-ing vs can-ing study - how they are related

• 18 months

• Infants heard grammatically correct vs incorrect sentences

• Two trials:

  • 1st: she is drinking coffee before work (is-ing)

  • 2nd: she can drinking coffee before word (can-ing)

• Results: infants listened longer to stories that were grammatically correct

• Sensitive to the dependency (relationship) between ing and its axillary verb

What is the picture book with common objects study - how it affects comprehension

• 23-28 months

• Picture book with common objects and they were instructed to find them

• Instruction sentences manipulated

  • Find the bird for me (grammatical)

  • Find * bird for me (no morpheme)

  • Find was bird for me (ungrammatical)

  • Find gub bird for me (nonsense)

• Results: children are more accurate at identifying the object when sentence used the correct morpheme

  • when the sentence is grammatically correct

What is the French comprehension study - how it affects comprehension 

• French 25 month olds

• Do infants use gender marked determiners (le vs la) to anticipate and interpret upcoming objects

• Trial

  • Informative (le vs la) - they showed a ball and banana

  • Not informative (le vs le) - showed a ball and boat

• Results: started to look at the correct object when only hearing the determiner 

  • shows they can use grammatical cues to predict the upcoming object

How is gender used to predict upcoming words study - how it affects comprehension

• 12-24 month olds

• Same set up as the French study

  • A picture of one boy - the description is II bambino

  • The other pic is two boys - the description is I bambini

• Results: started to look at the correct picture when hearing the determiner

Summary

• Children don’t produce function morphemes reliably

• BUT they have some knowledge about them

• Function words are probably dropped because there is a limit to what children can get out

What does MLU stand for?

• Standard measure: mean length of utterance, in morphemes