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Related Experiment Videos

The effects of inflectional variation on fast mapping of verbs in English and Spanish.

L M Bedore1, L B Leonard

  • 1Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Jesse H. Jones Communication Center, University of Texas at Austin, 78712-1089, USA. ibedore@mail.utexas.edu

Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|February 11, 2000
PubMed
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Children learning language, regardless of inflectional richness, struggle to connect different word forms. This impacts early syntactic development and word learning, even in Spanish speakers.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Syntactic bootstrapping relies on children recognizing word variations as a single lexical item.
  • Languages with rich inflectional morphology, like Spanish, may offer more exposure to word variations compared to English.
  • Early identification of inflectional variation is crucial for language acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether children learning languages with varying inflectional richness (English vs. Spanish) differ in their ability to map novel verbs with and without inflectional variation.
  • To determine if exposure to inflectional variation impacts children's word learning and syntactic bootstrapping abilities.

Main Methods:

  • A fast mapping task was used to teach novel verbs to 3-year-old English- and Spanish-speaking children.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Two conditions were employed: no-inflectional variation (stable word forms) and inflectional variation (alternating word forms).
  • Children's performance was assessed based on their ability to learn and retain the novel verbs under each condition.

    • Main Results:

    • Children performed significantly better in the no-inflectional variation condition compared to the inflectional variation condition.
    • No significant differences in performance were observed between the English- and Spanish-learning groups.
    • These results indicate a general difficulty in consistently parsing stems and inflections across both language groups.

    Conclusions:

    • Even children exposed to languages with rich inflectional systems may not consistently associate different word forms.
    • The ability to parse stems and inflections to recognize inflectionally varying forms develops later than previously assumed.
    • This challenges the assumption that richer morphology inherently facilitates earlier recognition of word variations for syntactic bootstrapping.