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6-month-olds' segmentation and representation of morphologically complex words

Abstract

One of the issues in infants’ language acquisition is - how do infants find

word-like forms from fluent speech. Previous literature on infants word segmentation

has mostly focused on understanding the bottom-up cues, i.e., cues

in the input such as acoustic/prosodic cues, that infants utilize in pulling out

nouns. This dissertation asks whether infants can use top-down cues in pulling

out verbs. Verb segmentation has been reported to be delayed as compared to

noun segmentation and these results have been used to explain the delay in its

acquisition of verbs. This dissertation argues otherwise, demonstrating that in

fact at the beginning of word segmentation, i.e., at 6-months, infants can pull

out verbs with the help of a known word mommy (a paradigm used in Bortfeld,

Morgan, Golinkoff, & Rathbun, 2005).

The current dissertation goes further and asks how these verbs are represented.

To be specific, this dissertation looks at 6-month-olds’ segmentation of

morphologically complex verbs, such as walking, walks, and walked, and asks

whether preverbal infants can relate these forms to the root form walk. The

main focus of this research is to understand how prelexical infants, who cannot

rely on semantics, relate complex forms to the root forms.

This dissertation expands our understanding of the role of the functional

morphemes (such as -ing, -ed, -s) in this process by conducting a corpus analysis

as well as behavioral experiments. In this dissertation, I locate the beginning

stage of this complex form acquisition and show that at 6-months, infants start

segmenting complex verbs, and based on the frequency and the characteristics

of the functional morphemes, infants begin to relate complex forms to root

forms. The findings of this dissertation highlight the importance of top-down

cues in early language development and have crucial implications for verb acquisition.

Also, these results provide evidence for morpheme-based processing

models and acquisition models such as prosody-functor models, arguing for

early representation of functional elements and their facilitatory influence on

word segmentation and representation.

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