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Interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect in toddlers' language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2006

BONNIE W. JOHNSON
Affiliation:
University of Florida
MARC E. FEY
Affiliation:
University of Kansas Medical Center

Abstract

This study examined the effect of lexical aspect on children's imitation accuracy of English tense-aspect morphology. Thirty-five typically developing children, ages 2;4 to 3;1, imitated sentence-pairs in which the same regular verb was used once in an activity (skip on the rug) and once in an accomplishment (skip out the door). Children imitated past-imperfective morphology equally well in accomplishments and activities, but they imitated past-perfective morphology with higher accuracy in accomplishments than activities. These findings suggest that children's early morphology development is influenced by lexical aspect conveyed at the sentence level, as predicted by the PROTOTYPE HYPOTHESIS.

Type
Note
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank the children, their families, and their other child-care providers that participated in this study. This work was based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Kansas by Bonnie W. Johnson, and was funded in part by a National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders Award #5 T32 DC0052. Preparation of this manuscript was partially supported by U.S. Department of Education Training Grant #H029D60035.