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Grammatical morpheme production in 4-year-old children
Denise V Balason1, Christine A Dollaghan
1University of Pittsburgh and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, Department of Communication Science and Disorders, PA 15260, USA. dvbst4@pitt.edu
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|October 17, 2002
Summary
Developmental expectations for grammatical morpheme (GM) use in 4-year-olds are unclear due to significant variability in obligatory contexts and production accuracy. Caution is advised when interpreting GM data from spontaneous language samples for clinical or research purposes.
Area of Science:
- Child Language Acquisition
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
Background:
- Grammatical morpheme (GM) production is crucial for understanding child language impairment.
- Existing evidence on developmental expectations for GM use is insufficient.
- Spontaneous language samples are commonly used to assess GM production.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate grammatical morpheme production in a large, diverse group of 4-year-olds.
- To examine variability in obligatory contexts (OCs) and GM usage.
- To assess the adequacy of spontaneous language samples for evaluating GM development.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of 15-minute spontaneous language samples from 100 sociodemographically diverse 4-year-olds.
- Quantification of obligatory contexts (OCs) for 14 grammatical morphemes.
- Calculation of percentage of correct GM usage within OCs.
Main Results:
- Substantial variability was found in both OC frequency and correct GM usage across participants.
- Adequate OCs for at least half the participants were found for only 7 of 14 GMs.
- Fewer than 25% of children contributed to group means for 6 GMs, despite high average production rates (>85%) in samples with sufficient OCs.
Conclusions:
- Current spontaneous language sample sizes may be inadequate for reliably assessing GM production in 4-year-olds.
- Interpreting GM production data from such samples for clinical or research purposes requires caution.
- The validity of using these data to identify deficits in inflectional morphology is questionable.