The Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflections in Child Language 1 Lois Bloom, Karin Lifter, and Jeremie Hafitz
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The Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflections in Child Language 1 Lois Bloom, Karin Lifter, and Jeremie Hafitz CITATION: Bloom, L., Lifter, K. and Hafitz (1980). The Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflections in Child Language, Language, 56, 386-412. Reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three, New York: Cambridge University, pp. 210-237. ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the semantic organization of verbs used in early sentences and the emergence of the inflections of the verb auxiliary (-ing, -s, -ed, irreg). In discussions of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes by Brown (1973), de Villiers & de Villiers (1973), and others, only the syntax and semantics (along with environmental frequency) of the individual morphemes themselves have been seriously discussed as contributing to the order in which they are acquired. However, the results of the present study suggest that the semantic organization of the verb system that children learn is at least as important as the meanings of the verb inflections for determining their acquisition. There have been few studies of the semantics of verbs in children’s early sentences. Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) described developmental differences between verbs of action and state, and between locative and nonlocative actions and states. Bloom, Miller, and Hood (1975) extended the categorization of locative verbs and described three semantic-syntactic categories of locative verbs that differed according to the relationship between a verb and its pre-verb and post-verb constituents (subject-verb and verb-complement). Bowerman (1974) used ‘error’ data to describe the emergence of causative verbs in her 2-year-old daughter’s language. The implication of these studies is that children learn the verbs of the language as a system and that verbs do not enter children’s vocabularies one at a time, as a function only of events in the context. This implication is supported by results of the study reported here. There have been many and varied studies of children’s acquisition of grammatical morphemes. Most have been experimental, exploring children’s knowledge of morphological rules for adding affixes to nonsense words, in the tradition of Berko (1958). Other studies have been observational (e.g., Brown, 1973; Cazden, 1968; and de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973), describing correlations between use of particular morphemes and increase in utterance length. The implications of these studies are that the grammatical morphemes are learned sequentially and apply in general to all of a child’s verbs. However, these implications are not supported by the results of the present study. Brown (1973) discussed the possibility that different verb inflections might be learned for different categories of verbs, for example, ‘process’ and ‘state’ verbs. Antinucci and Miller (1976) observed that past tense first appears only with certain verbs in the acquisition of Italian and English. In experimental studies of French- speaking children by Bronckart and Sinclair (1973) and of American English-speaking children by Harner (1981) and Smith (1978), event aspect influenced the inflections that children used in describing actions in elicited production tasks. After a description of the subjects and procedures for the present observational study, the emergence of verb inflections in the children’s sentences will be described. These results will then be discussed in terms of (1) the 1The research reported here was supported by Fellowship F1-MH-30,001, 1965-1968, from the National Institute of Mental Health; Research Grant HD 03828, 1971-1974, from the National Institute of Child Health and Development; and Research Grants from the National Science Foundation, 1975-1981, to Lois Bloom. The study was published originally in Language, 56, 386-412; reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three, New York: Cambridge University, pp. 210-237; and reformatted for this digital version with slight changes in organization and minor text editing. 2 semantics of verbs in relation to both syntax and aspect in child language and (2) the nature of the rules that children learn for verb inflection. SUBJECTS AND PROCEDURES The Children Eric, Gia, Kathryn, and Peter were born in the 1960s, the first-born children of white, college-educated parents who lived in university communities in New York City. Their parents were native speakers of American English and their mothers were their primary caregivers. They were chosen as subjects with these qualifications in what turned out to be, in retrospect, a naive effort to come up with a ‘homogeneous’ population. Since parent education, birth order, and economic differences among children had been found to be sources of individual differences in speech and language in other studies, these were the minimal ‘controls’ that seemed feasible to ensure that the children would be similar in their language learning.2 Eric, Gia, and Kathryn were each visited in their homes for approximately eight hours over several days, every six weeks; Peter was visited for approximately six hours every three weeks. The visits occurred in the context of their daily activities and informal play with a familiar adult (the investigators) and, less often, with their mothers. The same or similar toys were brought to all the sessions, for the different children and for each child, in an effort to establish consistency in the home contexts among the children and over time. The observations were audio recorded, and the transcriptions included all speech by child and adult, along with descriptions of nonlinguistic context and behavior.3 The observations of the children that provided the corpus of utterances for the present study began when verb inflections had begun to appear and their mean length of utterance (MLU) was ≥ 1.5 but < 2.0; the study continued until MLU was ≥ 2.5 but < 3.0. These observations consisted of 94 hours of naturalistic (nonelicited) language behavior−three sessions each with Eric and Gia, two with Kathryn, and seven with Peter (see Figure 1). The 15 observations were grouped into three successive periods on the basis of consistency in MLU, as indicated in Table 1; these periods coincided with MLU Stages I, II, and III of Brown (1973). The results of the study will be reported for these developmental stages, except where variation among the children precluded grouping the data. Each speech event with a multi-word utterance that included a verb relation was examined to observe (1) the frequency of occurrence of the linguistic/nonlinguistic contexts in which the inflections should have occurred (obligatory context) or could have occurred (optional context); the frequency of occurrence of each verb inflection (-ing, -s, -ed/irreg); and (3) the conditional use of the inflection, that is, the occurrence of the inflection in a given context. Only verbs that appeared in a particular child’s speech in both uninflected form and with at least one inflection were included in the analyses. That is, a verb used only in its inflected form by a particular child was not counted as inflected for the morpheme by that child. (In fact, less than .03 of the children’s verbs occurred only in their inflected forms.) In all, about 7,000 speech events with verb relations were examined. As will be seen, the verb inflections were just emerging in these children’s speech; their use of verb inflections in the period was far short of the criterion Brown (1973) had used to establish “acquisition” (90% occurrence in obligatory contexts). 2 However, see Bloom (1992) for a later appraisal of this decision. 3 The procedures for data collection and transcription are described in greater detail in Bloom (1970, pp. 234-9). See, also, Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) and conventions for transcription of child language recordings, App. A, in Bloom & Lahey (1978). The speech samples from Eric, Gia, and Kathryn were collected and transcribed by Lois Bloom. The speech samples from Peter were collected and transcribed by Lois Hood and Patsy Lightbown who took turns interacting with Peter and taking notes on the situational context and behavior. The transcriptions of the Eric, Gia, Kathryn, and Peter data are stored for access by other researchers in the Special Collections at the Gottesman Memorial Libraries, Teachers College, Columbia University; transcripts of the Peter data are also part of the CHILDES database, the Child Language Data Exchange System, Carnegie-Mellon University. 3 Figure 1. Progression in Mean Length of Utterance (Morphemes) according to age. Table 1. Description of Stages Age Number of Stage MLU Range Mean Range Observations I ≥ 1.5 < 2.0 23,2 22,3-24,1 4 II ≥ 2.0 < 2.5 25,2 25,0-25,3 3 III ≥ 2.5 < 3.0 a 26,3 24,2-28,2 8a aThe sixth observation of Peter was included in Stage III, even though MLU dropped to <2.5, because MLU had been >2.5 for the two preceding observ- ations (see Figure 1), and because the data in this observation were more continuous with Stage III than with Stage II. Obligatory and Optional Contexts Following Brown (1973), both linguistic and nonlinguistic criteria were used for determining the contexts for inflections in speech events. There were three criteria for obligatory contexts: 1. The linguistic context of the verb in the child’s own utterance required the use of an inflection (e.g., “I’m go outside,” where -ing was obligatory but was not used). 2. The prior linguistic context (child or adult) required the use of an inflection (e.g., Adult: “What are you doing?”/ Child: “I eat it,” where -ing was obligatory but was not used). 3. The nonlinguistic context of the speech situation required the use of an inflection (e.g., the book had just fallen off the table: “Book fall down,” where irreg was obligatory but was not used).