Regularity, sub-regularity and irregularity in French acquisition

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2009

Cognition, 2011

This study examines French-learning infants’ sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent ‘the boy(s) read(s)’) where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.

Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism account required? In a first experiment, we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. Subjects heard a spoken prime (such as aimons) immediately followed by lexical decision to a visual probe (such as aimer). We contrasted four types of French verbs, varying in the phonological and morphological regularity of their verb form inflection. These were (i) regular verbs (aimons/aimer) (ii) verbs that undergo predictable phonological changes (sèment/semer) (iii) verbs to which sub-rules apply (teignent/teindre) and (iv) irregular verbs with idiosyncratic alternations (vont/aller). The infinitive forms of these verbs were presented as target in three prime conditions: preceded either by a regular form, an irregular/modified form (except for the regular verbs), or a control unrelated pr...

2000

In this paper, some predictions of connectionist models are investigated using data from a continuous diary study of a German girl. Several findings on the acquisition of German verbs are reported, e.g., the acquisition of verbs shows a sudden non-linear increase, the composition of the verbal lexicon undergoes changes, the first overregularizations are found when structural and quantitative changes in the verb vocabulary appear. For the production of overregularizations a wave-like development is found, that is, times of high and low production of overregularized forms alternate. The formation of participles shows various patterns, for example irregularizations. The data presented here suggest a relationship between lexical and morphosyntactic development and the use of one associative learning mechanism for both regular and irregular inflection.

How and when children acquire the basic and essential rules of English morphology and syntax are questions that have been explored for decades. While there are no final conclusions about precisely how and when this happens, many researchers have worked to describe the process in terms that apply to most children most of the time. This paper examines the acquisition of morphological rules for English nouns, verbs, and adjectives, focusing on native speakers of English who are exposed to English during what is known as the critical period of language acquisition. This paper will create a dialogue among several extant articles on the subject, synthesizing prior research to create a description of the patterns of morphological rules acquisition in English language children. It is expected that the literature will reveal that children are able to extend rules of English morphology to novel nouns and verbs, but are unable to extend rules of English morphology to novel adjectives, and have greater facility with regular forms of words than with irregular forms of words in the given groups.

Psychology of Language and Communication, 2003

This paper considers whether the child's early vocabulary shows signs of being organized into word categories. Two main kinds of evidence are looked for: 1. differential production of fillers (referred to here more neutrally as Prefixed Additional Elements); ii. relevant phonomoprhological variation for verb-words, and only in them. Results of analyses of natural speech production provided by the longitudinal studies of two French acquiring children followed between the ages of 1;3 and 2;3, show that there is a first period in which words seem to constitute one, formally undifferentiated, set. Differentiation between noun-words and verb-words appears progressively, as evidenced by the differential occurrence of PAEs in prenominal and in preverbal positions, and in the appearance of phonomorphologically relevant variations only in words that are verbs in the language. Looking at connected aspects of language, other pehenomena are observed to occur at the same time, in particular,...

Eurosla Yearbook, 2009

This study investigates the validity of Dual-Mechanism Model in the mental representation of regular and irregular active past perfective verbs in adult non-native Greek. In this model, regular inflection is computed by a symbolic rule, while irregular words are fully stored in the lexicon. A nonce-probe elicitation task showed that both natives and non-natives generalized the regular affix -s, and more so in regular than in irregular perfective verb stems. Moreover, the degree of similarity of the nonce verbs to real ones did not affect the affixation of regulars. Dissimilar irregulars were affixed less often than similar ones by the intermediate learners but neither by the advanced learners, nor by the natives. Our findings support computation for regulars, as proposed by the Dual Mechanism Model, both in native and in non-native language acquisition. Yet, the model's claim for full storage of all irregular words is not verified.

25th Boston University Conference …, 2000

2007

Literacy studies, 2022

The chapter presents a study of the relation between the comprehension and production of articles and subject clitic pronouns in 2-year-old Frenchacquiring children. The production of grammatical morphemes occurring in the spontaneous speech of ten children was related to the performance these same children obtained in a comprehension task testing the children's understanding of the grammatical morphemes in question. Success in the task required children to retrieve the meaning of homophonous or nonce words on the sole basis of the category-specific grammatical morpheme preceding them-a definite article for nouns and a third person subject clitic pronoun for verbs. Overall, results indicate that comprehension and production are closely related. For the majority of the children, a high level of comprehension corresponded to a high level in production. The profile of one participant, and to a lesser degree that of two others, suggests that production might be ahead of comprehension. It should be noted, however, that in this study comprehension could not be assessed with the same degree of detail as spontaneous production. To shed further light on this issue, future studies should find a way to assess children's comprehension in finer detail, include additional participants, as well as plan studies where both production and comprehension are assessed on a longitudinal basis. Moreover, in order to better evaluate what children have acquired and how they have acquired it, it is suggested that studies of early language acquisition should include both comprehension and production as a standard method of analysis.