LING 2231 - The Morphosyntactic Development of First Language Acquisition Assignment

Assignment Task

The data for this assignment is taken from L.J. L.J. was three years, four months, and 28 days old (3;4.28) at the time of data collection. The data was collected over a week in a number of different settings (playground, skating, reading, and playing with blocks). All data is spontaneous. The data is presented as one data set containing 50 utterances. L.J. is acquiring English as an L1, and is not exposed to any other languages. L.J. is an only child, and spends most of his days at home with a parent. L.J.’s gender is irrelevant to the data analysis.

Data Set

Determine the number of morphemes in each of L.J.’s utterances. Then calculate L.J.’s MLU and determine L.J.’s morphosyntactic stage of acquisition.

Semantic Relations Analysis

Identify the semantic relation in each of the following utterances (taken from the data set). Do not include any function words (except for pronouns) when identifying semantic relations. Focus only on the content words in each of the child’s sentences.

Syntactic Analysis

Using the data and your analysis of the morphemes in L.J.’s utterances, fill in the following chart with the Brown’s Grammatical Morphemes are in the data set. There may not be examples for each morpheme.

Discuss L.J.’s acquisition of Brown’s grammatical morphemes (i.e. discuss which have been acquired, and which have not yet been acquired, and why).

If L.J.’s MLU is above 3.0, fill in the following chart and then briefly discuss L.J.’s acquisition of these different sentence types.

Discussion (i.e. How is L.J. forming negatives, yes-no question, and wh-questions? Can L.J. do inversion? wh-movement? Explain why or why not.)

If L.J.’s MLU is above 4.0, identify the different ways in which L.J. is increasing sentence length. If L.J.’s MLU is not above 4.0, do not answer this question.

Morphological Analysis

Using the data from the data set, fill in the following chart with all examples of the word-formation processes that L.J. uses. Include both those that correspond to adult words as well as those that are unique to the child.

Discuss L.J.’s acquisition of these word-formation processes. If L.J. uses derivation, what strategy is L.J. using?  If L.J. uses conversion, what strategy is L.J. using? If L.J. uses compounding, what strategy is L.J. using? Also comment on any examples of the above word-formation processes that are unique to the child (i.e. not found in adult language).

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