Application Assignment 1

M2 Building Blocks of Language

Part 1: Phonology, Morphology, & Syntax

Outline

Phonology

· The System of Sounds

· What is phonological development?

· Acquiring the rules that govern the sounds in a language (including the sound structure of syllables and words)

· Phonological representations are mental representations of sounds that allow us to differentiate one sound from another

· Examples of phonemes/minimal pairs

· How do we develop phonological representations?

· Prosodic cues

· Phonotactic cues

· Vowels develop before consonants

· Consonant order and rates of acquisition vary depending on functional load and exposure

· Why do you think /m/ emerges before /v/ during phonological development?

· What is phonological awareness?

Morphology

· The Structure of words

· Free morpheme

· Bound morpheme

· Inflectional morphemes

· Derivational morphemes

· Grammatical morphemes

· Inflectional morphemes are all grammatical morphemes

· Some free morphemes are grammatical morphemes

· What is Morphological development?

· Acquiring the rules that govern word structure

· There are similarities across children in the order they develop grammatical morphemes

· Native language or dialect has a strong influence on morphology in a second language or dialect

· Morphological difficulty is a hallmark of SLI

Syntax

· The Structure of sentences

· What is Syntactic development?

· Acquiring the rules that govern how words are organized into sentences

· This develops in progression (i.e., from simple and short utterances to complex and longer utterances)

· Again, exposure to language and language impairment will have an impact on development

· Basic sentence types will emerge during early development

· Declaratives - statements

· Negation – negative statements

· Interrogatives - questions

· Complex sentences should also begin to emerge

· Mean length of utterance (MLU)

· A measure of utterance length

· An estimate of syntactic complexity

· Uses morphemes as the unit of measurement

· How to calculate mlu

1. Transcribe at least 50 different utterances from a language sample

2. Count the number of morphemes in each utterance

3. Divide by the total number of utterances in the sample

4. Compare to Brown’s Stages of Development (p. 47 in textbook)