UI 5.

THE ACQUSITION OF MORPHOLOGY

Table of contents

UI 5. THE ACQUSITION OF MORPHOLOGY .................................................................. 56

5.1.Introduction .................................................................................................................. 56
5.2. Aims .............................................................................................................................. 56
5.3.On the acquisition of morphology .............................................................................. 57
5.4.The acquisition of inflection ........................................................................................ 57
5.4.1. Regular and irregular inflection ............................................................................. 58
5.4.2. Overregularisation errors ....................................................................................... 60
5.4.3. From irregularisation to regularisation .................................................................. 61
5.5. Case marking ............................................................................................................... 62
5.6. Possessive ‘s ................................................................................................................. 63
5.7. Tense- Aspect morphology ......................................................................................... 64
5.8. Subjectless sentences in early grammar ................................................................... 65
5.9.Summary ....................................................................................................................... 66
5.10.Evaluation ................................................................................................................... 66

5.1. Introduction

This unit deals with the acquisition of morphology and it shows that children aged
2-3 go through a developmental stage when they overgeneralize the frame of regular
morphology, omit possessives and inflection on verbs, use incorrect plural forms on nouns. In
spite of this, we will see that children are also very creative extend the pattern of regular
inflection to new words and also use derivational rules to create new lexical items.

5.2. Aims

Students will be able to:

- make the distinction between regular and irregular inflection
- describe the types of inflectional errors
- become familiar with the acquisition of case marking
- demonstrate a familiarity with tense-aspect morphology

Time envisaged for covering Unit 5: 2 hours

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 5.3. On the acquisition of morphology

Eve: Want lunch.

Mother: Oh you want lunch then.
Eve: Mommy gone.
Mother: Mommy’s gone.
Eve: Fraser coffee.
Mother: Fraser’s coffee.
(Brown, 1973)

Two- and three-year olds go through a developmental stage during which they tend to omit
possessives “-s” (e.g. Mary bag instead of Mary’s bag), inflection on verbs (i.e. third person
singular “-s” in the present tense) alternating between Mary wants one and Mary want one.
Empirical data reveal that young learners tend to overgeneralize the frame of regular
morphology, using incorrect plural forms of nouns such as mouses and tooths or incorrect past
tense forms as comed, in spite of having already learned the correct form of these words.
However, experimental studies have shown that they are also very creative and extend the
pattern of regular inflection to new words and use derivational rules to create new lexical items.
One observation is in order here: morphological rules are divided into (i) inflectional
rules and (ii) derivational rules. While the former changes the form of a lexical item judging
by its relation to other items within a sentence, the latter create new words. This distinction has
been intensely discussed in the literature and it has been given radically different views. On the
one hand, following the Split Morphology hypothesis (Perlmutter 1988), inflectional
morphology is treated non-lexically, while the derivational morphology belongs to the lexicon.
Chomsky’s (1970) Weak Lexicalist hypothesis holds that specific elements belong to the
lexicon while other elements are transformationally derived. The Strong Lexicalist hypothesis
holds that items come inflected/derived from the lexicon. At the other side of the spectrum,
Distributed Morphology claims that both inflectional/derivational morphology are derived
transformationally, thus in a similar way. On such accounts, we can raise the following
question: how do children cope with regular and derivational morphology in the process of
acquisition? The following section addresses the developmental onset of inflection in CLA.

5.4.The acquisition of inflection

The acquisition of inflection has ignited an interest especially in experimental linguistics

(see Berko 1958, Cazden 1968, Brown 1973, Slobin 1985 a.o.). The main reason is that
languages differ in what concerns the distinctions marked by the inflectional affixes; they also

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differ with respect to the typological types of inflectional systems they employ (i.e.
agglutinative, fusional and polysynthetic inflectional systems).
Inflectional morphology is placed at the interface of morphology, syntax and phonology.
Firstly, inflection gives new grammatical word forms and it is therefore part of morphology;
secondly, the grammatical information added brings about consequences on the other
constituents in a phrase and is thus syntax effective. Last but not least, the option among distinct
inflectional allomorphs may be determined phonologically.
Inflected forms are used very early by children, around their first birthday (cf.
MacWhinney 1976 on Hungarian, Toivainen 1980 on Finnish a.o.), in those languages where
uninflected stems do not function as viable words. In languages where this does not apply, first
inflected forms appear around the second birthday. Let us consider the case of a young German-
learner, who at 1 year and 10 months uttered kugel geht nich (eng. ball works not) where the
verb geh is inflected with -t, the third person singular marker, marking agreement between the
subject and the verb. What this example shows is that children acquire inflection very early in
the acquisition process and they already make use of the functional category INFL/AGR, which
is in line with the Full-Competence approach (see Poeppel and Wexler 1993). In contrast, the
Structure Building approach (see Clahsen, Eisenbeiss and Penke 1996) holds that these early
utterances are only formulaic expressions learnt by the child and stored as chunks in the mental
lexicon. Evidence for the last view comes from experimental linguistics where such chunks as
geht nich was found in repetition with other nouns, as in Auto gheht nich. No other items can
be placed inside the chunk, thus as adverb such as heute “today” would make the chunk illicit,
just as in the target language. Errors are a clear proof that the chunks are not yet analysed by
the child.

5.4.1. Regular and irregular inflection

In trying to test regular inflectional morphology, Berko (1958) showed through

experimental evidence that children are aware of morphological rules and that they can project
them to new words. In her experimental study, she tested the early acquisition of regular
inflectional morphology by looking at: the plural -s of nouns, the 3rd person singular -s, the -ed
form of regular verbs in the past tense, the possessive forms of the nouns, the -ing form of the
present participle as well as the degrees of comparison of adjectives. Let us look closely on the
formation rule for the plural of nouns. Children, aged 4-7, were presented cards with one bird-
like animals and shortly afterwards with two bird-like animals; they were also provided with

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made-up nouns which described the bird-like animals. The experimenter asked “This is a lun.
There is another one. There are two of them. There are two…”. The learner was required to
provide the plural form, that is the right inflection with the invented nouns, in an attempt to see
whether the child extended the morphological rules to novel made-up words. What the results
show (see Table 5) is that learners aged 4-7 are capable of extending the knowledge of regular
plural inflection to new words, such as the /s/ and /z/ allomorphs. In the case of gutches and
tasses they could not extend the /iz/ allomorph, however they already knew the plural for such
words as glass.

Table 3. Percentages of plural inflection

(Berko 1958: 161)

If we turn to irregular morphology, which is unpredictable, the question that we may

address is whether children acquire the two forms simultaneously or in the same way. Some
views argue that irregular inflectional forms must be memorized, due to their unpredictability.
In contrast, Pinker (1991, 1998) argues that irregular inflectional forms, such as the past tense
of irregular verbs share similarities such as (ring/rang and sing/sang). In light of this he holds
that language exhibits a computational component which contains rules, as well as an
associative memory system. While regular inflection involves the rules of grammar, irregular
inflectional forms are memorized pairs which are stored in an associative memory, thus
allowing for further analogies.
So far, we have seen that regular and irregular inflection represent two distinct
mechanisms. While regular inflection is rule-based, irregular inflection lies on an associative
process of saving information in the memory. It is important to mention that irregular forms are
not learnt by heart, for they can also follow certain patterns and errors which come from child
English confirm this:
(17) a. bring- brang
b. bite- bote
(Pinker 1998)

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 In sum, the acquisition of regular inflectional morphology is connected to the
computational component while the acquisition of irregular inflectional
morphology is connected to properties of the associative memory.

5.4.2. Overregularisation errors

Inflectional errors contain a faulty combination of stem and affix. We can distinguish two
types of errors: (a) overgeneralisation errors and (b) substitution errors. In what concerns the
first type of errors, an affix is applied to a stem which requires a different marker. For instance,
the past tense of the irregular verb sing would be wrongly marked as *singed instead of sang.
Substitution errors the inflected form provides faulty grammatical information in what the
context is concerned. Consider the example in (18) where the 3rd person marker for the singular
-t is used with a 3rd person plural subject:

(18) a. *da alle[3rd pl] läft (Simone, 2;2)

‘all are sleeping there’ (Penke 2012:15)

Data from experimental results reveal that this pattern of making overgeneralisations
among children is followed by a stage when the young learner starts using the irregular forms
correctly, with periods of mixing the two forms, in line with Bowerman’s argument that
“irregular forms rarely drop out, but rather continue to compete with their overregularized
counterparts throughout the period of error making” (1982: 342). Thus, before children acquire
the correct irregular forms, they go through multiple stages until they start using each form
appropriately. One possible explanation for this would be that the child memorizes irregular
forms from the input and then extends it to other verbs; unavoidably, the learner will start using
overextended incorrect forms.
Similarly, at the early onset of inflectional morphology children have no knowledge of
the -ed pattern for regular verbs. They simply memorize the form without extracting any rule;
the same holds for irregular past tense forms. Once they have learnt the regular pattern, they
extend it to irregular verbs and thus create overregularizations. But as irregular patterns have
also been acquired and stored, they can be retrived. As a result, at this early stage, children use
both the correct and incorrect irregular (overregularized) form of the same verb. In time, the
child will renounce overregularization and start using the correct irregular form; this is known

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in the literature as the blocking- and- retrieval- failure approach (see Marcus et al 1992 for
further information).

5.4.3. From irregularisation to regularisation

As already mentioned, children sometimes use irregular past tense patterns to either
irregular (19a-c) of regular verbs (20a-c) as shown in the examples below.

(19) a. bring- brang

b. think- thunk
c. drink- dranked
(20) a. trick- truck
b. wipe- wope
c. walk- has walken
(Xu and Pinker 1995)

This phenomenon has been given different interpretations. Some linguists claim that, at a
particular stage, children consistently irregularise some or all verbs (Xu and Pinker 1995).
Following the dual mechanism model, irregularisation is viewed as an outcome of a retrieval
failure. Firstly, the irregular form is saved in the lexicon but because of the associative essence
of memory, the phonological characteristics of a verb may overlap with those of a similar verb.
Thus, the correct form cannot be retrieved, and the learner uses the form of a similar verb. In
sum, irregularisation does not refer to rule-overgeneralisation, but it depends on irregular forms
deposited in the memory.
What then determines regular and irregular inflectional patterns? The literature points that
young learners are sensitive to phonological data, but also to grammatical structure and
semantics. Following the connectionist model, phonological information dictates the patterns
of regular/irregular inflection. However, phonological input alone does not seem to be sufficient
as evidence from English shows that there are verbs which bear homophonous stem forms, but
distinct past tense forms as the examples below show.

(21) a. T-Bone lay on his bed. (lie/lay)

b. T-Bone lied to me again. (lie/lied) (Kim et al 1994:177)

Thus, as input is not enough, the literature proposes a different explanation. Irregularity
is given by a characteristic of verb roots. Children depend on the grammatical structure of
lexical items when they choose between regular/irregular inflection. When a verb has a noun
root, the affix will be the -ed for the past tense form as in ring the city- ringed the city. The last

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position defended in the literature (Lakoff 1987) is that regularization is due to semantic
extendedness, that is why, extended verbs have a higher chance to be regularized, as is the case
of denominal verbs. Taking into consideration all of the above explanations, it is desirable to
opt for a grammar structure account, a view also shared by Kim et al (1994).

5.5. Case marking

The acquisition of case marking has been the focus of debate especially because case
markers are absent in the onset or optional and the process of acquisition takes several years
(Baker 1979, Pnker 1989, Braine 1992 a.o). Proponents of the continuity approach (Pinker
1984) claim that children can make categorizations at all developmental stages. In contrast,
proponents of maturation theory (Radford 1990) hold that the category of case only matures
when the child reaches his/her second birthday because up to that age not all case features are
active from a syntactic point of view.
Interestingly, not all case markers are simultaneously acquired. Studies have shown that
nominative/accusative markers appear first, followed by the dative markers in such languages
as Japanese or German. For instance, in German the Nom/Acc distinction is encoded in personal
pronouns/ definite articles and only later on is marked on indefinite articles, thus supporting the
claim that children learn individual form mappings, class by class or item by item (Eisenbeiss
2003, Tomasello 2003).
Within the ‘premorphological’ phase, children do not produce case marked forms;
instead, they use base forms or forms learned by heart. In Finnish or in any other agglutinating
language, children use fossilized deictic particles like siellä ‘there’ or adverbs like kotiin ‘home-
ILL’ (Laalo 2002:94-94). Long before case oppositions emerge, children use truncations,
reduplications and blends. The ‘protomorphology’ phase occurs when children use their first
oppositions of several forms of the same stem. The first case oppositions occur at different
times across languages; for instance, in Russian case emerges at the age of 31.5 months in boys
and of 27.8 in girls (cf. Saphiro and Chistovich 2000), however with many occurring errors, as
paradigms are not complete by this early age. In Lithuanian the Gen is firstly used to mark
possession and only later is used for other functions. Paradigms are almost complete only at the
phase of adult-like morphology, but still not entirely equivalent as erroneous case markings still
occur. Furthermore, studies indicate that Turkish children acquire case around the age of 1;3
while children speaking Slavic and Baltic languages use their first case opposition around the
age of 1;9 (Savickien˙e 2002, Voeikova and Gagarina 2002 a.o).

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5.6. Possessive ‘s

Language acquisition studies have shown that during the early stages of language
development, children omit the possessive affix -s as shown in (22 a,b) below, but they use it
in isolation, as illustrated in (23 a,b).

(22) a. Mommy milk (Travis, 17 months)

b. Lauren house (Tomasello 1998:354)
(23) a. Mommy’s. Mommy key (Gia, 20 months) (Bloom 1970:93)
b. That Daddy’s; That Kimmy ball (Kendal 23 months) (Bowerman 1973:242)

One case study on the acquisition of possessives in English is reported in Tomasello

(1998). In his study, his daughter used the first non-prepositional possessive at the age of 1;5
in possessor-possessum constructions where she omitted the genitive -s. After a certain period
had passed, the started using the possessive -s variably, not constantly. Eventually, around the
age of 1;6 she started using the -s in constructions containing a verb, as shown in (24) below.

(24) Cat bit Daddy’s finger (Travis 1;6) (Tomasello 1998:358)

Once the genitive -s was consistently used, pronominal possessives also emerged, around
the age of 1;6 as shown in (25a-c).

(25) a. My book; my water (Travis 1;7) (Tomasello 1998:359)

b. Brush my teeth (Travis 1;8) (Tomasello 1998:366)
c. Drink mine tea (Travis 1;8) (Tomasello 1998: 366)

Radford and Galasso (1998) report another study of a child named Nicholas who did not
use possessive -s at all between 2;3 and 3;1; starting with the age of 3;2 to 3;6 he used 23% of
-s in the investigated contexts. In contrast to Travis, from Tomasello’s study discussed above,
Nicholas used pronominal possessives first and then he acquired possessive -s. His pronominal
possessives were in the Acc case as shown in (26).

(26) That me car; Have me show; Where me car. (Radford & Galasso 1998: 40)

Following Radford (1990), the omission of the possessive -s can be attributed to the fact
that children pass through a lexical stage in which they have not yet learned the functional
categories (here, the functional category D which projects a DP) thus, functional categories are
underspecified at this early stage of acquisition.

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 5.7. Tense- Aspect morphology

Before we discuss the tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition it is important to

make some clarifications. Tense is a category that indicates temporal deixis; it relates a situation
to some other time. Aspect is a non-deictic category, and it refers to “different ways of viewing
the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Comrie 1976:3). If we consider the two
structures he is eating and he was eating the difference lies in tense; if we take he ate bread and
he was eating bread, the difference between the two lies in aspect, as the first structure describes
the situation in its entirety, while the second describes the situation as being composed of
phases.
The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology has been discussed in the literature and the
aspect hypothesis has been proposed. The theory holds that young learners firstly use past
marking with achievement and accomplishment verbs and later on extend it to activity and
stative verbs. Moreover, in languages with progressive aspect, learners use progressive marking
with activity verbs and later with accomplishment and achievement verbs. Last but not least,
learners do not overextend progressive marking to stative verbs (Shirai and Andersen
1995:745).
Brockart and Sinclair (1973) showed in one experimental investigation that French
children (2;11-8;7) use present forms for durative events and perfective past forms for events
with clear results. As the children grew older, this tendency faded. Similarly, Antinucci and
Miller (1976) found the same pattern with English and Italian speaking children. The young
learners used the past morphology to encode events with observable end results. One possible
explanation for this pattern would be that at the onset of acquisition children have not yet
acquired the concept of temporal deixis.
In an opposing view, Weist et al (1984) upon analysing data from Polish speaking
children, argued that both tense and aspect are acquired at early stages of acquisition. They
argued against the idea that when using verbal morphology, young learners mark aspect or the
end state of an action.
A less stringent approach was proposed by Bickerton (1981) who formulated the language
biogram hypothesis. According to his proposal certain linguistic structures are bioprogrammed
in children’s brains. As an argument, he draws a parallel between creole languages which are
not genetically related, but have so many similarities and the language spoken by children (i.e.
a crole) which is based on the pidgin language used by their parents.

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5.8. Subjectless sentences in early grammar

During early stages of acquisition, children produce sentences in which some constituents
might be missing; such is the case of subjectless sentences shown in (27 a-c) below:

(27) a. hug Mommy

b. see running
c. see bed
(Bloom 1989: 57)

One possible explanation for subjectless sentences is that children represent distinct
grammars as compared to adults. Hyams (1986) proposes that children begin with a pro-drop
grammar in which overt subjects are optional, such as the case of Italian. However, in non pro-
drop languages such as English, overt subjects are mandatory, thus a pro-drop grammar
wouldn’t do justice and children would have to switch their grammar from pro-drop to non-pro
drop (see Borer and Wexles 1998, Hyams 1986).
Bloom (1989) holds that young learners correctly represent grammars from the onset and
that subject omissions are due to performance factors. This raises the question of why, then, are
young learner’s utterances so short. The explanation lies in the very idea that what children
utter is not a reflection of what they know. Empirical studies have shown that there is evidence
in terms of limitations in child language. No matter how long an adult’s sentence is, when the
child imitates it, he manifests an inability to use long strings of words (Brown and Fraser 1963).
Young learners’ sentences are short and this has no connection with their grammars, but to a
limitation or inability. It has further been suggested that children’s omissions are frequent and
they do not omit only subjects, but also Dos, IOs, verbs and locative arguments among others,
as shown in (28 a-c) below.

(28) I put the cup on the desk.

a. I put
b. put cup
c. put desk

Contrary to the pro-drop account discussed above, some children include neither the
subject nor do they omit it, as pointed out by Mazuka et al (1986). Their option is to lower it to
a schwa.
If we are to adopt the explanation that subject omissions are due to processing difficulties,
this would imply that subjects would have to be omitted from longer utterances, as opposed to

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shorter ones. Bloom (1989) tested this prediction and indeed, young learners omitted subjects
occurring in longer VPs; thus, sentences with long VPs such as make me a cake would have
their subject omitted more often that in short VPs such as make cookie, with significant
statistical differences.

5.9.Summary

This chapter presented some key aspects regarding the acquisition of morphology
in children. We have seen that inflected forms are used very early by children
learning certain languages. Learners are aware of the morphological rules and they
project them to new words, however, there are stages when children make overgeneralisations
and they start producing errors. This doesn’t last long and correct forms surface.

5.10.Evaluation

Once you got acquainted with the theoretical part, answer the following questions:

1. How many types of morphological rules exist?

2. When do children start using inflected forms?
3. What is the difference between regular and irregular inflection?
4. What are overregularization errors?
5. When are case markers acquired?

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