April 19: Language acquisition

First, watch this short introductory video on language acquisition and focus especially on what is said about the acquisition of morphology. You should be able to explain a) high amplitude sucking; b) when first words appear; c) one/two word phase; d) the wug test.

Second, look at this one-minute video of Jean Berko, the author of the wug test, using it, so you get an idea of what it looks like and how it can be used to study the acquisition of derivational morphology (cf. the final example):

Third, read the part attached of the famous paper by Jean Berko (the full text can be downloaded here if you are interested), the source of the famous wug test. The first five pages describe the methodology, the rest of the pages (i.e., three pages) discuss the results which concern word-formation.

Finally, have a look at the overview paper on Word-formation in language acquisition; I would like you to read a) section 3; b) section 4.1 (on German) or 4.2 (on English) or 4.3 (on French); and c) section 5. Focus especially on what this tells you about the various approaches to morphology that we've talked about and their plausibility. We will talk about this at the beginning on next week's class.