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Discourse and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Michael Jeffrey Farrar
Michael Jeffrey Farrar*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
*
Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA.
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Abstract

Adult recasts of child utterances have been shown to be related in a general way to the child's acquisition of syntactic structures. The current study had two aims. The first aim was to determine which feature(s) of recasts (i.e. reformulation, expansion, topic continuation, or reply) was responsible for facilitating language acquisition by comparing them to other maternal discourse models that were systematically defined by these properties. The second aim was to investigate this relation more specifically by relating adult discourse models of specific grammatical morphemes to the child's acquisition of those same morphemes. Again, recasts were of particular interest. Twelve mother-child dyads were videorecorded during one hour of naturalistic interaction when the children were 1;10 and 2;4. Results indicated that maternal recasts of specific morphemes were related to the acquisition of those same grammatical morphemes during certain developmental periods, whereas other grammatical morphemes were facilitated by expansions and topic continuations. These results are discussed in terms of the processes responsible for these effects.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 607 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

Portions of this article were part of a dissertation submitted to Emory University. This research was presented to the Eleventh Annual Boston Child Language Conference in October, 1986. Appreciation is expressed to Michael Tomasello and several anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.

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