Bilingualism reading group

Speaker: Tiffany Boersma (Netherlands)

Title: The acquisition of morphophonology: the influence of linguistic and child level specific factors

Abstract: My dissertation seeks to explain the influence of linguistic and child specific factors  on the acquisition of morphophonology in both typically developing children (age 5;0 – 10;0) and children with developmental dyslexia (age 8;0 – 10;0). Previous studies have shown that, although children are aware of the obligatory nature of inflections, they show difficulties in the morphophonological domain. Nevertheless, morphophonological acquisition has received relatively little attention in the literature.  My project is two-fold: investigate 1) whether phonological processing skills and vocabulary size are associated with and 2) whether type frequency, phonotactic frequency and phonological complexity of the stem and allomorph have an influence on performance on a production, but also a grammaticality judgement task testing morphophonological skills. Specifically, the focus lies on both real and nonce Dutch past tense (/də/ and /tə/), and diminutive (/jə/, /tjə/, /pjə/, /ətjə/ and /kjə/) stem + allomorph combinations.

The current presentation will focus on the second goal: linguistic factors. Mixed linear regression analyses indicated that children performed better on the voiced allomorph /də/ in the case of the past tense and that they had problems with correctly applying/judging the diminutive /kjə/ and /ətjə/ allomorphs. It appears that both type frequency of the allomorph and phonological complexity of the stem influence performance on the production and judgement task in even the oldest children.  Further results, on for example the effect of phonotactic frequency, and the implications of the results will be expanded on in my talk.