Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals.

In this paper we study the acquisition of German noun plurals in relation to the question of how children represent regular and irregular inflection. Pinker and Prince (1992) have demonstrated several dissociations between regular and irregular inflection in the English past tense system. However, in English, the default status of -ed is confounded with its high frequency; therefore inflectional systems other than English past tense formation must be examined. The noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes. Based on longitudinal data from impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children, we find a striking, statistically significant correlation: plural affixes that are used in overregularizations, namely -n or -s, are left out within compounds. This correlation shows that even impaired children are sensitive to the distinction between regular and irregular morphology. We propose a linguistic analysis of the correlation in terms of Kiparsky's (1982, 1985) level-ordering model plus an additional ordering condition on affixes: default (regular) affixes cannot serve as input to compounding processes.     

Can word formation be understood or understanded by semantics alone?

Arguments concerning the relative role of semantic and grammatical factors in word formation have proven to be a wedge issue in current debates over the nature of linguistic representation and processing. In the present paper, we re-examine claims by Ramscar [Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not require a rule. Cognitive Psychology, 45, 45-94.] that it is semantic rather than grammatical factors that influence the choice of regular or irregular past tense forms for English verbs. In Experiment 1, we first replicated Ramscar's (2002) experiment, which showed semantic influences on choice of past tense inflection. A novel verb, splink, was introduced in a semantic context that was reminiscent of an existing regular or irregular rhyme verb: blink or drink. Participants favored the past tense form (splinked or splank) that matched that of the semantically similar verb. In Experiment 2, we introduced novel verbs in a context suggesting that they were grammatically derived from nouns (i.e., denominals). Some current symbolic processing models propose that regular past tense forms should be preferred for such forms. When Ramscar's (2002) original contexts for derivational verbs were re-tested in this condition, we replicated his failure to find a preference for regular past tense forms. However, when the contexts were modified to make the grammatical process more salient, we did find a preference for regular past tense forms, suggesting that the derivational status might have been ambiguous in the original materials. In Experiment 3, we tested whether acceptability ratings for regular or irregular past tense forms of grammatically derived verbs could be explained by semantic distance metrics or by ratings of noun-to-verb derivational status. Ratings of semantic distance and grammatical derivation were orthogonal factors in Experiment 3. Only derivational status predicted acceptability ratings for regular past tense forms. Taken together, the present results suggest that semantic factors do not explain the regularization of irregular verbs in derivational contexts, although semantic factors can affect the choice of past tense forms in certain circumstances.     

Language-experience facilitates discrimination of /d-th/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-th/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English contrast improved with age. However, in the absence of experience with this contrast, discrimination of French children and adults remained unchanged during development. Furthermore, although simultaneous bilingual and monolingual English adults were comparable, children exposed to both English and French were poorer at discriminating this contrast when compared to monolingual English-learning 4-year-olds. Thus, language experience facilitates perception of the English /d-th/ contrast and this facilitation occurs later in development when English and French are acquired simultaneously. The difference between bilingual and monolingual acquisition has implications for language organization in children with simultaneous exposure.     

Sex differences in past tense overregularization

Hartshorne and Ullman (2006 ) presented naturalistic language data from 25 children (15 boys, 10 girls) and showed that girls produced more past tense overregularization errors than did boys. In particular, girls were more likely to overregularize irregular verbs whose stems share phonological similarities with regular verbs. It was argued that the result supported the Declarative/Procedural model of language, a neuropsychological analogue of the dual‐route approach to language. In the current study we present experimental data that are inconsistent with these naturalistic data. Eighty children (40 males, 40 females) aged 5;0–6;9 completed a past tense elicitation task, a test of declarative memory, and a test of non‐verbal intelligence. The results revealed no sex differences on any of the measures. Instead, the best predictors of overregularization rates were item‐level features of the test verbs. We discuss the results within the context of dual versus single route debate on past tense acquisition.     

Language-specific Knowledge and Short-term Memory in Bilingual and Non-bilingual Children

The sensitivity of children's phonological short-term memory performance to languagespecific knowledge was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, monolingual English children, English-French bilingual children, and English children who were learning French as a second language were compared on measures of phonological short-term memory and vocabulary in the two languages. The children's short-term memory performance in each language mirrored their familiarity with English and French, with greater vocabulary knowledge being associated with higher levels of recall of both words and nonwords in that language. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, in which two groups of children with good knowledge of English and French were examined: native bilingual children who had comparable knowledge of the two languages and non-native bilingual children who had a greater knowledge of their native than second language. The findings indicate that phonological short-term memory is not a language-independent system but, rather, functions in a highly language-specific way.     

Inflectional morphology in German Williams syndrome

In a recent paper, Clahsen and Almazan (1998) reported a dissociation between unimpaired regular and impaired irregular past tense morphology in English Williams syndrome (WS). Our aim is to investigate whether these findings carry over to another language with different morphological systems. We present data on regular and irregular participles and noun plurals from 2 German WS subjects and 10 controls matching in mental age. For noun plurals, regular morphology is intact in WS, whereas irregular forms are impaired. A similar dissociation is observed for participles: while regular inflection is unimpaired, WS subjects, unlike controls, apply the regular suffix incorrectly to frequent irregular verbs. We discuss our findings against the current debate between connectionist and dualistic approaches to the language faculty.     

Development of coronal stop perception: bilingual infants keep pace with their monolingual peers

Previous studies indicate that the discrimination of native phonetic contrasts in infants exposed to two languages from birth follows a different developmental time course from that observed in monolingual infants. We compared infant discrimination of dental (French) and alveolar (English) place variants of /d/ in three groups differing in language experience. At 6-8 months, infants in all three language groups succeeded; at 10-12 months, monolingual English and bilingual but not monolingual French infants distinguished this contrast. Thus, for highly frequent, similar phones, despite overlap in cross-linguistic distributions, bilingual infants performed on par with their English monolingual peers and better than their French monolingual peers.     

Once a French Speaker,Always a French Speaker? Bilingual Children's Thinking About the Stability of Language

Despite early emerging and impressive linguistic abilities, young children demonstrate ostensibly puzzling beliefs about the nature of language. In some circumstances monolingual children even express the belief that an individual's language is more stable than her race. The present research investigated bilingual children's thinking about the relative stability of language and race (Kinzler & Dautel, 2012). Five‐to six‐year‐old bilingual children were asked to judge whether a target child who varied in race (White or Black) and language (English or French) would grow up to be an adult who maintained the target child's race or her language. Similar to many monolingual children, a heterogeneous group of bilingual children on average chose the language‐match. Yet French‐English bilingual children were relatively more likely to choose the race‐match, especially when tested in their non‐dominant language. Specific experience with relevant languages, and communicating in a non‐dominant language, may contribute to children's developing metalinguistic success and their thinking about social categorization.     

Processing of Spanish Preterite regular and irregular verbs: the role of neighborhood density

Research into lexical processes shows that frequency and phonological similarity (neighborhood density) affect word processing and retrieval. Previous studies on inflectional morphology have examined the influence of frequency of occurrence in speech production on the inflectional verb paradigm in English. Limited work has been done to examine the influence of phonological similarity in languages with a more complex morphological system than English. The present study examined the influence of neighborhood density on the processing of Spanish Preterite regular and irregular verbs as produced by thirty native speakers of Spanish. The results of a naming task showed that regular verbs were processed faster and more accurately than irregular ones. Similar to what has been observed in English, a facilitative effect of neighborhood density for -ir verbs was observed in both regular and irregular verbs, such that -ir verbs with dense neighborhoods were produced faster and more accurately than -ir verbs with sparse neighborhoods. However, no neighborhood density effects were observed for -ar verbs (regular and irregular) in reaction times and accuracy rates. Thus, the activation of a specific -ir verb was facilitated by similar sounding verbs regardless of being regular and irregular. Implications for models of morphology language processing are discussed.     

A Behavioral Study of Regularity,Irregularity and Rules in the English Past Tense

Opposing views of storage and processing of morphologically complex words (e.g., past tense) have been suggested: the dual system, whereby regular forms are not in the lexicon but are generated by rule, while irregular forms are explicitly represented; the single system, whereby regular and irregular forms are computed by a single system, using associative connections; and a system whereby phonological rules relate both regular and irregular past to present tense forms. Two reaction time experiments investigated the production of the past tense in English in response to the auditory presentation of the present tense of the verb. The first experiment addressed the methodology of presenting regulars and irregulars in blocked form as in a previous study (Jaeger et al. in Language 72:451–497, 1996). Blocked presentation results showed longer RTs for the elicitation of irregular pasts than for regular pasts; however, there were no differences between regular and irregular elicitation when the presentation was randomized, indicating that it is rules that are being primed. The second experiment tested whether the response time advantage found for blocked regular verbs in the first experiment might also extend to irregular verb forms exhibiting the same sub-regularity (e.g., sing-sang may prime ring-rang). Results showed a trend towards slower RTs when past tense forms from different sub-regularities follow one another, suggesting interference between one sub-regularity and another.     

Reading,syntactic, orthographic,and working memory skills of bilingual Arabic-English speaking Canadian children

This study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 56 bilingual Arab-Canadian children age's 9-14. English was their main instructional language, and Arabic was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program in Toronto where they were taught to read and write Arabic. The children were administered word and pseudo-word reading, language, and working memory tests in English and Arabic. The majority of the children showed at least adequate proficiency in both languages. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudo-word reading working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The poor readers in Arabic had lower scores on all linguistic tasks, except the visual task. There were no significant differences between bilingual English Arabic children and monolingual English-speaking children on the reading, language, and memory tasks. However, bilingual English Arabic children who had reading problems in English had higher scores on English pseudo-word reading and spelling tasks than monolingual English-speaking children with reading disabilities, probably because of positive transfer from the regular nature of Arabic orthography. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of language reading skills in both languages—Arabic and English—despite the different nature of the two orthographies.     

Regularity re-revisited: modality matters

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs. In contrast to our previous intra-modal (visual-visual) priming experiments, in this cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming study, we found that regular verbs with an orthographically salient morphemic aspectual marker elicited the same facilitation as those without an orthographically salient marker. However, irregular verbs did not exhibit a different priming pattern with respect to modality. We interpret these results in the framework of a two-level lexical processing approach with modality-specific access representations at a surface level and modality-independent morphemic representations at a deeper level.     

Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English: Data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish—English bilinguals

Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world’s population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1 was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish—English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A–C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Crossover: the role of morphological awareness in French immersion children's reading

Achieving biliteracy is a remarkable accomplishment, and it is important to understand the range of factors that permit its successful realization. The authors investigated a factor known to affect reading in monolingual children that has received little attention in the second-language literature: morphological awareness. The researchers tracked the relationships between performance on past tense analogy tasks (the measure of morphological awareness) and reading of English and French in a group of 58 French immersion children across Grades 1-3. Early measures of English morphological awareness were significantly related to both English and French reading, after controlling for several variables. In contrast, early measures of French morphological awareness were significantly related to French reading only. Later measures of morphological awareness in French were significantly related to English and French reading. These relationships persisted even after controlling for several variables. Results of this study suggest that morphological awareness can be applied to reading across orthographies and that this relationship changes as children build their language and literacy skills. These findings are discussed in light of current theories of second-language reading acquisition.     

The relationship between phonological and morphological deficits in Broca's aphasia: further evidence from errors in verb inflection

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca's aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The interpretation given was that a generalised phonological impairment was central to the patients' language deficits, including their poor performance on regular past tense verbs. The current paper provides further evidence in favour of this hypothesis, on the basis of a detailed analysis of the errors produced by these same 10 patients in reading, repetition, and sentence completion for a large number of regular, irregular, and nonce verbs. The patients' predominant error types in all tasks and for all verb types were close and distant phonologically related responses. The balance between close and distant errors varied along three continua: the severity of the patient (more distant errors produced by the more severely impaired patients); the difficulty of the task (more distant errors in sentence completion>reading>repetition); the difficulty of the item (more distant errors for novel word forms than real verbs). A position analysis for these phonologically related errors revealed that vowels were most likely to be preserved and that consonant onsets and offsets were equally likely to be incorrect. Critically, the patients' errors exhibited a strong tendency to simplify the phonological form of the target. These results are consistent with the notion that the patients' relatively greater difficulty with regular past tenses reflects a phonological impairment that is sensitive to the complexity of spoken forms.     

Translation norms for English and Spanish: The role of lexical variables,word class,and L2 proficiency in negotiating translation ambiguity

We present a set of translation norms for 670 English and 760 Spanish nouns, verbs and class ambiguous items that varied in their lexical properties in both languages, collected from 80 bilingual participants. Half of the words in each language received more than a single translation across participants. Cue word frequency and imageability were both negatively correlated with number of translations. Word class predicted number of translations: Nouns had fewer translations than did verbs, which had fewer translations than class-ambiguous items. The translation probability of specific responses was positively correlated with target word frequency and imageability, and with its form overlap with the cue word. Translation choice was modulated by L2 proficiency: Less proficient bilinguals tended to produce lower probability translations than more proficient bilinguals, but only in forward translation, from Ll to L2. These findings highlight the importance of translation ambiguity as a factor influencing bilingual representation and performance. The norms can also provide an important resource to assist researchers in the selection of experimental materials for studies of bilingual and monolingual language performance. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Errors of Omission in English-Speaking Children's Production of Plurals and the Past Tense: The Effects of Frequency, Phonology, and Competition

How do English‐speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying “dress” to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11–9;9) participated in 3 inflection studies. In Study 1, we show that errors of omission occur until the age of 7 and are more likely with both sibilant regular nouns (e.g., dress) and irregular nouns (e.g., man) than regular nouns (e.g., dog). Sibilant nouns are more likely to be inflected if they are high frequency. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that similar effects apply to the inflection of verbs and that there is an advantage for “regular‐like” irregulars whose inflected form, but not stem form, ends in d/t. The results imply that (a) stems and inflected forms compete for production and (b) children generalize both product‐oriented and source‐oriented schemas when learning about inflectional morphology.     

Effects of past language experience and present language context on the shape bias in Spanish–English bilingual children

English‐monolingual children develop a shape bias early in language acquisition, such that they more often generalize a novel label based on shape than other features. Spanish‐monolingual children, however, do not show this bias to the same extent (Hahn & Cantrell, 2012). Studying children who are simultaneously learning both Spanish and English presents a unique opportunity to further investigate how this word‐learning bias develops. Thus, we asked how Spanish–English bilingual children (M_age = 21.31 months) perform in a novel‐noun generalization (NNG) task, specifically examining how past language experience (i.e. language exposure and vocabulary size) and present language context (i.e. whether the NNG task was conducted in Spanish or English) influence the strength of the shape bias. Participants completed the NNG task either entirely in English (N = 16) or entirely in Spanish (N = 16), as well as language understanding tasks in both English and Spanish to ensure that they understood what the experimenter was asking them to do. Parents completed a language exposure survey and vocabulary checklists in Spanish and English. There was a significant interaction between condition and choice type: Bilingual children in the English condition showed a shape bias in the NNG task, but bilingual children in the Spanish condition showed no reliable biases. No measures of past language experience were related to NNG task performance. These results suggest that when learning new words, bilingual children are attuned to the regularities of the present language context, and prior language experiences may play a more secondary role.     

Why do children learn to say "Broke"? A model of learning the past tense without feedback

Learning the English past tense is characterized by a U-shaped learning function for the irregular verbs. Existing cognitive models often rely on a sudden increase in vocabulary, a high token-frequency of regular verbs, and complicated schemes of feedback in order to model this phenomenon. All these assumptions are at odds with empirical data. In this paper a hybrid ACT-R model is presented that shows U-shaped learning without direct feedback, changes in vocabulary, or unrealistically high rates of regular verbs. The model is capable of learning the default rule, even if regular forms are infrequent. It can also help explore the question of why there is a distinction between regular and irregular verbs in the first place, by examining the costs and benefits of both types of verbs.