Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Child Language Acquisition - data set

And just to be on the safe side, here's a quick 1a style question on CLA. All you have to do is identify and label 3 "interesting" features from the data set below:

Data set:

  1. I readed that book yesterday.
  2. What that man doing?
  3. Dat's gusting. I not like that dinner.
  4. My tooth is hurty.
If you give your points as comments, I'll try to give you some feedback (my own child language data providers permitting).


Laura said...

"I readed that book yesterday."
Here, the over-extension (I think that's the term, I'm probably wrong) of the past tense is used, where the suffix of "-ed" is seen to be non-standard. The child is possibly confusing past tense verbs such as "walked" with "read," and is attempting to use the same grammatical patterns in their speech.

"What that man doing?"
It is obvious that the chid's utterance is an interrogative, but there is the ellipsis of "is," which would not occur in standard speech.

"Dat's gusting. I not like that dinner."
The child has changed the fricative of "that" into the plosive of "dat," possibly due to finding the non-standard form easier to pronounce.
"Disgusting" has also been clipped to form "gusting," possibly for the same reason.
The ellipsis of "do" is also apparent in the child's declarative.

Dan said...

1. Is overgeneralisation rather than overextension (g for grammar is how i remember it) but all the rest is fine.
2. Yes
3. That sounds fine to me, but you could be simpler and just call it substitution (or th-fronting). And the disgusting - gusting might be more accurate as deletion of unstressed syllable". Clipping tends to be used more in connection with written words rather than spoken sounds.

So probably 4/5 if you counted the first one, or 5/5 if you just picked the three best points from the ones above.

Zahra said...

1) The past tense inflectional affix "ed" is used on "read" instead of just "read". This is overgenerization as the child believe "ed" can be used on all words.

2) the child ellipses the "is". (is this deletion?)

3) the child uses "Dat" as it is easier to pronounce than "that". "gusting" is deletion of the "d". And "do" is ellipsed.

Dan said...

1. Yes
2. Yes, but I'm not sure "ellipses" exists as a word! I've checked it on t'interweb and it seems like the jury's out on this and "ellipts", so maybe it's best to say "the child has used ellipsis by omitting the verb"
3. You could be more specific to get the 2 marks here: how about "substitution" or "th-fronting". And then, "gusting" is deletion , but deletion of an unstressed syllable (like nana - banana, jamas - pyjamas).