The Acquisition of Inflection and the Dual Mechanism Model
Joseph Galasso
May 2004
 

The study of syntactic development in children, for all intents and purposes, is reducible to a single minded inquiry into how the very young child (implicitly) knows to distinguish between lexical stems and functional affixes. Hence, the overriding question burning in the minds of most developmental linguists is morpho-phonological in nature. For instance, it would seem that the child must at least know (a priori) the stem before she can then engage in a dual-track process by which ambient separation of the morpho-phonological distinction attributive to past tense is carried out, say, between the paradigmatic representation of the English word play vs. play-ed /ple-d/ (a dual processing which provokes separation of the /play/-stem and the /d/-affix).
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007324
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Proceedings of the Child Language Research Forum 2004-Stanford
keywords: child language acquisition, inflection, the dual mechanism model, syntax
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