Open Collections

Verb acquistion : the role of morphological bootstrapping

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's ability to use verb inflections to learn about verb meaning. This ability was assessed in twenty four children with normally developing language (NL) aged 3;6 to 5;2 and eight children with specific language impairment (SLI) aged 4;0 to 4;5. Each participant viewed a video a depicting novel event scene paired with an inflected novel verb and were then asked to identify additional events which also fit the novel label. General findings indicated that younger NL children (aged 3;6 to 4;5) used verb inflections to help interpret novel verb meaning. The older N L children (aged 4;6 to 5;2) and the children with SLI did not show evidence of using this strategy. The results are discussed with reference to knowledge of grammatical morphemes, knowledge of temporal concepts, cognitive/linguistic biases and metacognitive abilities.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-03-21

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/6339

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace