How Learners Move From Sound To Morphology

TL;DR: This article investigated the phenomenon of how children acquire grammatical morphology, including both function words and inflectional morphemes, and found that the phonology and prosodic structure of a language interact with how and when grammatical morphologies are perceived/comprehended and produced.

Abstract: This chapter investigates the phenomenon of how children acquire grammatical morphology, including both function words and inflectional morphemes. In particular, it shows that the phonology and prosodic structure of a language interact with how and when grammatical morphemes are perceived/comprehended and produced. With respect to function words such as articles, it shows that those that can be prosodified as part of a foot/prosodic word tend to be produced first, as do inflectional morphemes occurring at the ends of phrases/utterances. The fact that similar patterns of prosodic interactions between the perception/production of grammatical morphology and the lexicon appear crosslinguistically suggests that these are robust phenomena. This has both theoretical implications for understanding the interactions between children’s developing linguistic competencies at the phonology/syntax interface, as well as practical implications for clinicians working with children with language delay.