Initial Morphological Learning in Preverbal Infants

Autor/inn/en	Marquis, Alexandra; Shi, Rushen
Titel	Initial Morphological Learning in Preverbal Infants
Quelle	In: Cognition, 122 (2012) 1, S.61-66 (6 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0010-0277
DOI	10.1016/j.cognition.2011.07.004
Schlagwörter	Semantics; Form Classes (Languages); Morphemes; Infants; French; Vocabulary Development; Language Acquisition; Morphology (Languages) + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Semantik; Analytischer Sprachbau; Morphem; Infant; Toddler; Toddlers; Kleinkind; Französisch; Wortschatzarbeit; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Morphology; Morphologie
Abstract	How do children learn the internal structure of inflected words? We hypothesized that bound functional morphemes begin to be encoded at the preverbal stage, driven by their frequent occurrence with highly variable roots, and that infants in turn use these morphemes to interpret other words with the same inflections. Using a preferential looking procedure, we showed that French-learning 11-month-olds encoded the frequent French functor /e/, and perceived bare roots and their inflected variants as related forms. In another experiment an added training phase presented an artificial suffix co-occurring with many pseudo-roots. Infants learned the new suffix and used it to interpret novel affixed words that never occurred during the training. These findings demonstrate that initial learning of sub-lexical functors and morphological alternations is frequency-based, without relying on word meaning. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.) (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10