Bogoyvalenskiy, D

[Clarke, John E]

Dear Dan,

Thank you for your message. My present endeavour is to complete my MA
dissertation which is looking at the acquisition of comparative adjectives
in 5 and 7 year-old children, following up studies pursued by Prof. Clahsen
& Prof. Temple here at Essex (to appear) who investigate the phenomena in
relation to children with WS using the much admired elicited production
experiment and one by Dr. Graziano-King at CUNY (1999) who looked at the
developmental path of 'er' and 'more' using the much admired relative
judgement task. My conclusion discusses briefly an issue that was raised
recently on info-childes, that of trying to account for the large number of
stems in (impaired) subjects in wug type tasks in relation to me trying to
account for why my unimpaired seven-year olds were performing puzzlingly and
produced so many stems. I felt they didn't refuse to perform the task,
however, because they produced the superlative form often fine. I was
looking back at Berko, Selby, the earliest elicited production studies in my
area I knew, noting that eliciting adjectival comparatives was difficult. I
wanted to know about Bogoyvalenskiy as well just in order to indicate the
contribution to the 'wug' effort. I found that there was a difference in the
usage of 'er' and 'more' in the two tasks. The elicited production
experiment just didn't (despite all the mysterious stems) get the children
producing 'more', they just always fell back on a stem, a substitution or
'er'. The judgement task, however, saw a higher preference in a greater
number of adjective categories (as Graziano-King categorised them into
monosyllables and unstressed endings in disyllables) for 'more'. The two
tasks, then perhaps (at least for these thirty-eight children) tap different
things. One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this
interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder',
'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better
than you!' Isn't it strange?

All the best and thank you to all those who gave me the reference,

John
MA Language Acquisition
University of Essex, UK
jeclar at essex.ac.uk
unclejohnnies24 at yahoo.co.uk