Jun, Jong Sup. 2011. Children's Syntactic Knowledge of English Derivational Morphology: Evidence from Early Suffixes. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 36-4, 1053-1073. Previous studies on the acquisition of English derivational morphology suggest that children acquire the syntactic knowledge of derivational morphemes after Grade 4 in elementary school; that is, children do not learn the parts of speech (POS) change between a root and its affixed form (e.g. drive driver) until they become nine years old. On the contrary, the present study explores preschool children's knowledge of English derivational morphology, and shows that children have some syntactic knowledge at age 3-5. The evidence comes from English-speaking children's use of so called early suffixes, i.e. -er/or, -ie, and -y. We extracted preschool children's derivatives from the HSLLD corpus (Dickinson & Tabors, 2001) in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). We then cross-classified the words in terms of children's age, the semantic transparency, the POS change, and the suffix type. The log-linear regression analysis shows that preschool children use derivational suffixes following the generalization that is sensitive to the POS of the derived words. This finding supports the view that children have the implicit syntactic knowledge of derivational morphology during the preschool years. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)
목차
Abstract 1. Introduction 2. Previous Studies on the Acquisition of English Derivational Morphology 3. The Design of the Present Study 3.1. Material 3.2. Data Coding 3.3. Testing Theoretical Hypotheses by Using Statistics 3.4. Positing Hypotheses 4. Log-Linear Models for Children's Use of Early Suffixes 4.1. Testing the Hypotheses 4.2. Discussion 5. Conclusion References