Purpose: The third person singular present tense morpheme (3s) has a protracted course of development for children with language disorders and for typically developing children compared to other phonetically or linguistically similar morphemes. This study’s objective is to describe the phonetic and linguistic environment of 3s allomorphs in parent input. Methods: Participants were 14 monolingual English-speaking parents of typically developing toddlers. Parents’ allomorphs of 3s were examined for sentence position, allomorph type, coda of the inflected verb, onset of the following word, and the verb’s input frequency both before and after the toddlers first used 3s. Results: At both measurement points, the majority of instances of 3s were sentence medial, took the form of an/s/or/z/allomorph, and both followed and preceded non-sibilant consonants. At the second measurement point, when emergence of 3s had begun for all children, parents inflected a significantly greater number of different verb types with 3s. Parents also inflected a greater number of verbs with low frequency in parent input at Time 2, as demonstrated through the calculation of a Weighted Verb Diversity score. Conclusions: The findings of this study are both compatible with previous investigations of phonetic and linguistic environment and also build on those findings by examining the environment in greater detail. Speech-language pathologists could consider selecting target verbs that are intransitive and end with sibilants to increase the salience of the 3s morpheme for clinical populations at risk for delayed acquisition of the 3s morpheme.
Purpose: The third person singular present tense morpheme (3s) has a protracted course of development for children with language disorders and for typically developing children compared to other phonetically or linguistically similar morphemes. This study’s objective is to describe the phonetic and linguistic environment of 3s allomorphs in parent input. Methods: Participants were 14 monolingual English-speaking parents of typically developing toddlers. Parents’ allomorphs of 3s were examined for sentence position, allomorph type, coda of the inflected verb, onset of the following word, and the verb’s input frequency both before and after the toddlers first used 3s. Results: At both measurement points, the majority of instances of 3s were sentence medial, took the form of an/s/or/z/allomorph, and both followed and preceded non-sibilant consonants. At the second measurement point, when emergence of 3s had begun for all children, parents inflected a significantly greater number of different verb types with 3s. Parents also inflected a greater number of verbs with low frequency in parent input at Time 2, as demonstrated through the calculation of a Weighted Verb Diversity score. Conclusions: The findings of this study are both compatible with previous investigations of phonetic and linguistic environment and also build on those findings by examining the environment in greater detail. Speech-language pathologists could consider selecting target verbs that are intransitive and end with sibilants to increase the salience of the 3s morpheme for clinical populations at risk for delayed acquisition of the 3s morpheme.
INTRODUCTION METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS CONCLUSIONS
