Summary of suggestions of research on inflected and derived words.

Tue May 24 13:15:39 UTC 2005

Last week, I posted a request for information on children's understanding/processing of inflected and derived words, particularly on comparisons between the two. I received a number of replies, some pointing to classics in the field and others to new work. They've been very useful. Thank you to all!

Contributions are listed below for any others who are interested in morphological representation and processing. Any others would still be gratefully received.

>From Prof. Dr. Leonor Scliar-Cabral:

At the moment we are focusing on the acquisition of verbal affixation in 
Brazilian Portuguese. We have already coded the %mor line of the 1st stage and Brian MacWhinney and me are preparing a paper on the subject. I have an extensive bibliography on the acquisition of verbal morphology of Romance languages. Are you interested in? 

Some years ago I adapted the Berko test into Portuguese. Most part of the papers are in Portuguese, but I have a few in English.
I am sure that there is a specific module preserving the verbal affixes (including rules for allomorphic variants), whenever the language is highly flexional.

>From Isabelle Barriere, PhD:

On top of my head, it seems to me that Dorit Ravid discusses this issue in her book on Hebrew acquisition and change and Shanley in her monograph & articles on Inuktitut.  There are also studies that explore this issue wrt to literacy development in Engl. and other lgs.  

>From Linda Jarmulowicz: 

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "directly compare inflected and derived words".  If you mean a balanced study looking at elicited productions, I don't know of any.  I think the problem is because these are difficult to balance in terms of frequency, semantic transparency, and phonological characteristics. There are certainly developmental differences in when children acquire inflectional and derivational endings -- you may want to look at anything by Eve Clark or early work by Bruce Derwing for additional developmental information. There is a lot of work on derivational morphology, and even inflectional morphology, in relation to literacy (reading and particularly writing/spelling).

Anglin, J. M. (1993). Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 58(10), 1-166.
Clark, E. V. (1993). The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 
Derwing, B. L., and Baker, W. J. (1979). Recent research on the acquisition of English morphology. In P. Fletcher and M. Garman (Eds.), Language Acquisition: Studies in First Language Development, 1st Ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Emmorey, K. (1989). Auditory morphological priming in the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4(2), 73-92. ** This study includes both inflected and derived words
Rubin, H., Patterson, P. A., and Kantor, M. (1991). Morphological development and writing ability in children and adults. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 22, 228-235. ** This one includes both inflectional and derivational endings
Nagy, W. E. and Anderson, R. C. (1984). How many words are there in printed school English. Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 304-330. ** This one has a little bit of everything.
Windsor, J. and Hwang, M. (1999a). Derivational suffix productivity for students with and without language-learning disabilities. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42 (1), 220-230.
Windsor, J. and Hwang, M. (1999b). Children's auditory lexical decisions: A limited processing capacity account of language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42 (4), 990-1002.

Here are some theoretically relevant references:

Bybee, J. L. (1985). Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Pub Co.
** Chapter 4 has an interesting article on the artificiality of the distinction made between derivational and inflectional processes.

Bybee, J. (2001). Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge Univ Press.
** Despite it's title, it deals quite a bit with morphology and lexical representation -- very connectionist

My own work is on phonological development of derived words with stress changing suffixes (which in English are only derivational suffixes). So, I admit that I haven't spent much time thinking about the inflectional suffixes much.  Anyway, I hope these are useful to you.  Good luck.

>From Gisela Szagun: 

I'm not sure whether this is directly on your topic, but just in case you are interested in languages other than English also, I sending you the reference of my paper on the acquisition of German plurals. The process does not fit into the pattern of regular/irregular. Most inflected languages do not fit into that pattern, anyway. English is a very special case.

Szagun, G. (2001). Learning different regularities: The acquisition of noun plurals by German-speaking children. First Language, 21, 109-141.

>From Alejandra Auza: 
    I have been working on Spanish derivational morphology acquisition for 
some years to date. I used a semi-experimental task for naming derivational 
nominals (agentive terms) I have some papers published in Spanish, with a 
functional perspective. The last two years I have worked with a reaction 
time task, to observe dynamic repetition on-line, of two classes of words: 
nominals and adjectives. If you are interested, please write me.

>From Eve Clark:

I have published a lot on word-formation (compounding and derivation)
so that might give you some baselines.  I did not, however, make any
comparisons to inflectional morphology in the same children.
You might also look at work by Ruth Berman on Hebrew: she did do
some comparisons.
And there are brief sections in most of the chapters in Slobin's
volumes on Crosslinguistic Acquisition, so for many different languages.

Hélène Deacon, D.Phil. 
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Life Sciences Center, Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
B3H 4J1
For couriers, add 1355 Oxford St.

Webpage: http://myweb.dal.ca/sdeacon/
Office: LSC 2337
Phone: (902) 494-2538 
Fax: (902) 494-6585
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