Language Acquisition

1 Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed linguistic analysis of the language of one child, and to ground the data from this investigation in the literature on acquisition. The child used in this study is Eva, a female, aged 2 years 11 months, coming from an upper-middle class background. Both parents are fluent speakers of (a dialect of) Standard English. Both they and Eva are from New Orleans. Data for this study were elicited through conversations with the child over a period of two weeks, in sessions of approximately one hour per day. These took place in the Newcomb Nursery School, a setting familiar to the child, and sometimes involved teachers or other children, with whom the child was acquainted. Some data were elicited by showing the child pictures for identification. The conversations were recorded, selections were transcribed. Interesting patterns or irregularities in the child’s speech were and analyzed.

2 Phonology

Eva has almost a full phonetic inventory, so that her speech is nearly fully developed. However, she does make a number of systematic errors which can be captured by the rules in (1 - 5). These follow the normal development of children, where, say, fricatives and liquids are mastered later than stops and glides.






In (1), non-syllabic liquid [r] becomes a [w] glide. This is a common substitution in child language. It is a constitutes a change in the PLACE feature of the element from labial to coronal. (2) also treats a change involving [r]. This time, the vowel immediately preceding it, changes its backness value. This is a reasonable change, given the retroflex [] draws the tongue farther back in the mouth; this is, therefore, a type of assimilation. This seems to be an idiosyncrasy in Eva’s speech, since none of the other children (or her parents) pronounce these words this way. (3) and (4) detail two further very common substitutions: stops for fricatives. The voicing values remain the same for each. Also note that [s], which in English usually is the first fricative to appear, can also substitute for the more difficult []. Finally, (5) shows syllabic or dark [l] becomes a [w]. This is again a familiar substitution of a glide for a liquid, and is from a change both in the place of articulation and in the feature [lateral]. A syllabic [l], by virtue of its being syllabic, will appear in the Nucleus of a syllable, and dark [l] always appears in the Coda. Thus, any [l] in a syllable’s rhyme will be dark, and will tend toward the [w] or even a [] in Eva’s speech. Again, this is not unusual, as the tongue is drawn back, and is lowered.
Speaking of syllables, Eva has the full range of allowable syllables in English, including CVC, CCV, CCVC, and CVCC (6).


3 Morphology

Morphologically, Eva is largely able to produce adult forms. She marks 3s agreement; conjugates be and cliticizes auxiliaries; produces present progressive forms and past perfect forms; and correctly forms regular and at least some irregular past tense markings (7). She marks nouns for both Genitive and Accusative case, and is able to produce regular plural endings (8).
(7)






(8)


It tastes yucky.
I am.
This is pizza.
These are my orange shoes.
I’m making a bear.
Here’s a snake.
They’re for your car.
I like to go in the lizard’s mouth.
He needs corn...
Here’s some corn for him. 		He’s got one
We’re both driving.
I’m painting a tree.
He’s pinched me.
I pulled his hand.
I made a diamond.
I saw one.
snakes
bears
sausages

Irregular plurals, on the other hand, constitute her one major divergence from adult forms. The data in (9) show that she has not mastered any irregular plural, except for teeth (listed above). Possible explanations could be that [tus] is simply difficult to say, or that her parents constantly remind her to brush her teeth, so that she has learned this form. However, I am forced to note that teeth was a spontaneous utterance, while all the irregular plurals listed came from an identification task at a different time. The nature of the elicitation could have affected the results.

(9)

 foots
mouses 		fishes
sheeps 		octopuses
Mickey Mouses

The indefinite article was always realized as a and never an, as can be seen in (10).

(10)

No, it’s a oval.
Here’s a eye.
He’s got a one of those.

All derivational morphology I collected came from compounding words (11).

(11)

 globe-ball
kitty-cat-s

The second example is also interesting because it follows the predictions of Kiparsky’s level-ordering model, where the level 2 morphemes kitty and cat are compounded before the level 3 inflectional morpheme -s. More examples of this sort would have been nice, however.

4 Syntax

Eva’s grammar is quite equipped with an I node, as evidenced by her broad use of auxiliaries. She uses auxiliary be in (attested) the 3sg and 2sg/1-3pl forms (there is no data for 1sg, though this is admittedly a somewhat rarer construction in the adult grammar, and that could explain its absence from this corpus). She uses auxiliary do in (as far as I can tell) all normal adult uses (e.g. inversion in questions). Her favorite auxiliary by far seems to be can, however, while will is virtually ignored. In fact, all future tense constructions are rendered with a be going to construction. Her methods of question formation are for the most part like those of adults, for both WH-questions and Yes/No questions. There are but a few notable exceptions to her WH-question formation which I shall discuss now.

First, there is an anomaly in sentence (12), which appears to be underlyingly identical to the correctly uttered (13).

(12)
(13)		 Why you were sitting on K.’s chair?
What are they doing with your crawfish?

The only real difference between the two is the [+past] tense marking of be in the first sentence. One could argue that the cognitive load of two movements and a tense marker became too great a burden for Eva, who was then forced to sacrifice the inversion rule. I hesitate to argue for this analysis on the basis of a single sentence, so I shall at this point ascribe it to natural variation caused by constant internal modification of her grammar. This seems plausible, given her age is in the midst of the “All Hell Breaks Loose” stage of development.



The second case where a WH-question was ill-formed is (14), which in the adult grammar could be correctly formed as in (15) or (16)

(14)
(15)
(16)		 Why do you don’t?
Why do you not?
Why don’t you?



As (15), (16) show, the adult can either move the auxiliary alone, stranding the negative marker under I, or can transpose both. When Eva moved the auxiliary, she stranded the negative. If we assume that the realization of [+negative] for Eva is don’t instead of not, we can easily explain sentence (14). We can find support in examining Eva’s interpretation of negative sentences where do and [+neg] are separated, as in the dialogues in (17) and (18).

(17)

(18)

 A: Don’t you want to talk to the crawfish?
E: No I don’t.
A: Do you like mad worms?
E: No.
A: Do you not like mad worms?
E: I said ‘no’.

The former shows that she can correctly interpret a sentence where both the auxiliary and negative elements remain together, even if transposed. In the latter, however, where the second question I ask contains a stranded negative using adult-form not, she fails to interpret it as a negative question. Instead, she thinks that I have asked her the same (positive) question twice, as is evident by her answer.

Eva’s rules for negation must be very interesting indeed. First, I observed that she only used contracted n’t with the auxiliaries do and can; I have no evidence for will since she shunned this element in general, and a similar situation holds for 2sg/1-3pl forms of be. However, in every case where she used is or am, uncontracted not was used for negation. This is not surprising for am, as an amn’t (or ain’t) form is missing in the standard adult grammar, so she would have little or no evidence of its existence. Isn’t, however, is a fairly common construction. One possible explanation for this phenomenon could be that she doesn’t consider not to be the general negative marker, which optionally contracts and attaches to auxiliary elements, but rather that she interprets is not, can’t, and don’t as individual, separate “negative words”. Evidence for this comes from the cases where her WH-questions do not match adult forms (see above). Following this hypothesis, one would expect sentences of the sort in (19), where I has been fronted, but the negative marker (in this case can’t) has been stranded inside the sentence.

(19) Why do you can’t do X?

Unfortunately, I have no attested utterances of this sort. However, I have no data to contradict this analysis either, and this fact, taken with the support of sentences with don’t means that such a hypothesis is at least plausible.

Further, sentence (20) would have to be treated as an exception or variation if one analyzed Eva’s don’ts in the same way as the adult. If we treat them as lexical negatives, however, she would be forming her negative in the same way, just using yet another negator, no.

(20) No, I no want the dark blue, I want the light blue.

This again seems to be a viable interpretation of the data, as children typically do not begin using not as a negative marker until the age of 4. Eva seems to be atypical in using a variety of different markers for negation (none of which is the correct adult one), but one might view his as a type of parallel development to what happens in morphology, where exceptional forms may be learned, then discarded in favor of a more regular rule. We can say that Eva has yet to learn the simple not generalization, but instead is using positive- negative pairs of auxiliaries (is~is not; do~don’t; can~can’t).

As to grammatical sub-theories, I have very little evidence. When I tried to elicit responses for judgments on control and bounding, Eva became sullen, claiming that she didn’t know how to do what I was asking. As to binding, I again have scant evidence from our conversations to make any sort of analysis. In the dialogue in (21), Eva was clearly just repeating my words, and then, perhaps, playing with them. At any rate, there is no evidence here that she understands the coreferential properties of the reflexives. A further scrap of evidence about structures at LF is (22), where the lack of agreement between the subject and predicate nominative signals that something has gone wrong in her interpretation.

(21)




(22)		 E: You just turned me.
A: I didn’t. You turned yourself.
E: No, you turned yourself. I turned yourself.
A: You turned myself?
E: Yeah.
This is his shoes.


4 Conclusions

For her age, Eva seems to be progressing at about average. Phonologically, she still retains features which one might think she would have already lost, i.e. substituting stops for inter-dental fricatives, replacing [r] with [w], however, as regular as these features are in her speech, they are still not absolutes. She is gradually replacing them with adult forms. With respect to morphology, one would have expected her to have mastered the rules for, e.g. plural formation (including irregulars) already, but she appears not to have done so, although as I said this could have been a result of the situation. However, in terms of syntax, Eva’s grammar has taken off. Particularly telling is her use of negatives. Children younger than 3;6 generally put their negative particle, no, in the focus position (front), but Eva is already using sentence-internal negation. She has not acquired fluency with the particle not, but we can see that she has posited a number of rules about the placement and derivation of negative particles. Like most children her age, she is able to use auxiliaries to form questions, but she is for the most part able to form WH-questions without problems. Although she seems to have difficulty interpreting binding expressions, that is normal for children up to 3;6 years. I did not discuss semantics above, for there is not much to say, except that again, she is progressing like the average child. There is evidence of overextension of meaning on her part (beer for bottle), but the fact that she uses the term globe-ball shows that she is differentiating between like items to some extent (it’s not any sort of ball, but a globe-ball). Overall, then, the development of this child follows the general stages of first language acquisition. Her linguistic behavior as a whole is typical of children of her age.

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Language Acquisition