PubMed · 7410497
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L A Rescorla. 1980. Overextension in early language development.. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900002658
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The present study examines noun-noun compounds where the internal noun is pluralized (e.g., new books shelf), contrary to normal constraints that prohibit such constructions. It is proposed that these apparent violations are licensed by a recursive mechanism where world formation passes into Syntax and back into Morphology. Thirty-six 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on their interpretations of compounds fronted by an adjective. When asked to point to a picture of a red rats eater, children preferred a picture where the rats were red over one in which the eater was red. The opposite preference was found when children were asked to point to a red rat eater. These response patterns reflect a recursive-syntactic interpretation when the noun is plural, but a non-recursive interpretation when the noun is singular. The results suggest that children's word formation processes allow complex interactions between grammatical systems from early in acquisition.
Several competing proposals for the (under)specification of phonological representations are evaluated against the facts of phonemic acquisition. Longitudinal evidence relating to the emergence of a voice contrast in the well-documented study of Amahl (from age 2;2 to 3;11) is reconsidered. Neither contrastive specification nor context-free radical underspecification is capable of accounting for the facts. The problem is in the characterization of the change in the status of a feature from being noncontrastive and conditioned by context at one stage to being contrastive with phonetic effects that diffuse gradually through the lexicon. Both frameworks must treat as accidental the persistence of the early substitution pattern and require the postulation of wholesale changes in underlying representations, where these changes do not accord well with the observed phonetic changes or with the facts available to the learner. Context-sensitive radical underspecification provides a plausible account of each stage and the transition between stages with minimal grammar change.
Laryngeal-supralaryngeal cyclicity has been put forth as an acquisition principle that describes expansion of the phonemic inventory as a bivalent cycle with alternations between the elaboration of laryngeal and supralaryngeal properties of the system (Gierut, 1994). This study evaluated experimentally the claims of the principle by manipulating the domain of the cycle and the phase relationship of the cycle as independent variables, and by monitoring longitudinally the order of emergent phonemic distinctions in the sound systems of seven children with phonological delays (aged 3;4 to 5;8) as the dependent variable. Three general findings emerged: (1) the course of acquisition for all children was consistent with cyclicity; (2) there were no differences in phonemic acquisition between children taught a laryngeal as opposed to a supralaryngeal distinction; and (3) children taught out-of-phase with the cycle evidenced greater phonemic expansion than those taught in-phase with the cycle.