Morphology In Language Comprehension Production And Acquisition

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the 6th MOrphological PROcessing Conference MOPROC (Turku) and contains 13 articles. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and acquisition. Specific questions relate to the time course with which morphemes come available, what factors fa

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the 6th MOrphological PROcessing Conference MOPROC (Turku) and contains 13 articles. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and acquisition. Specific questions relate to the time course with which morphemes come available, what factors facilitate their use, the role of orthographic and semantic transparency in complex word processing and how morphology should be incorporated in models of word processing. The chapters in this volume provide a wealth of empirical results in several languages obtained with state-of-the-art experimental paradigms and will be an inspiration for further studies in morphological processing.

Interest in morphology has undergone rapid growth over the past two decades and the area is now seen as crucially important, both in relation to other aspects of grammar and in relation to other disciplines.

Synthesizing a range of studies on morphological processing from the past 30 years, this edited collection presents the current state of knowledge on morphological processing and defines classroom practices to help students conceptualise the role of morphology in reading, spelling, and vocabulary development. Research has increasingly indicated the importance of morphological tasks in relation to reading, spelling, and vocabulary acquisition in the classroom. Chapter authors present the theoretical considerations guiding morphological processing research to date, address the use of morphology with reference to different populations of learners, and propose effective and innovative instructional strategies for integrating morphology in the classroom.

This Research Topic explores the processing of morphemes, the smallest units of language that bear meaning and that combine to form more complex words. The articles gathered under this Research Topic investigate typical and atypical morphological processing by children and adolescents in ten different languages. These articles provide cross-linguistic and cross-script evidence of the early sensitivity of children to the morphemic structure of words, irrespective of whether they are struggling readers or typically developing. All in all, the collection allows for a better understanding of how morphological processing skills develop, providing valuable clues as to how this competence can be used as a tool to improve literacy acquisition in struggling readers.

The papers comprising this volume focus on a broad range of acquisition phenomena (subject dislocation, structural case, word order, determiners, pronouns, quantifiers and logical words) from different languages and language combinations. These include languages with large numbers of speakers (French, German, Spanish) and less frequently spoken ones (Norwegian, Russian, Swiss-German, Hebrew, Basque and Serbo-Croatian) within different language acquisition scenarios and a wide range of populations. Most contributions adopt a common theoretical background within the generative approach with the aim to advance, discuss and critically analyse other research on first, bilingual and language impaired acquisition. The various sections of this stimulating volume reflect different theoretical and methodological perspectives of current research investigating morphology and syntax and offer diverging interpretations.

It is now well established that phonological -- and orthographic -- codes play a crucial role in the recognition of isolated words and in understanding the sequences of words that comprise a sentence. However, words and sentences are organized with respect to morphological as well as phonological components. It is thus unfortunate that the morpheme has received relatively little attention in the experimental literature, either from psychologists or linguists. Due to recent methodological developments, however, now is an opportune time to address morphological issues. In the experimental literature, there is a tendency to examine various psycholinguistic processes in English and then to assume that the account given applies with equal significance to English and to other languages. Written languages differ, however, in the extent to which they capture phonological as contrasted with morphological units. Moreover, with respect to the morpheme, languages differ in the principle by which morphemes are connected to form new words. This volume focuses on morphological processes in word recognition and reading with an eye toward comparing morphological processes with orthographic and phonological processes. Cross-language comparisons are examined as a tool with which to probe universal linguistic processes, and a variety of research methodologies are described. Because it makes the experimental literature in languages other than English more accessible, this book is expected to be of interest to many readers. It also directs attention to the subject of language processing in general -- an issue which is of central interest to cognitive psychologists and linguists as well as educators and clinicians.

In this final volume in the series, the contributors attempt to "expand the contexts" in which child language has been examined crosslinguistically. The chapters build on themes that have been touched on, anticipated, and promised in earlier volumes in the series. The study of child language has been situated in the disciplines of psychology and linguistics, and has been most responsive to dominant issues in those fields such as nativism and learning, comprehension and production, errors, input, and universals of morphology and syntax. The context has primarily been that of the individual child, interacting with a parent, and deciphering the linguistic code. The code has been generally treated in these volumes as a system of morphology and syntax, with little attention to phonology and prosody. Attention has been paid occasionally to the facts that the child is acquiring language in a sociocultural setting and that language is used in contexts of semantic and pragmatic communication. In addition, there has been a degree of attention paid to the interactions between language and cognition in the process of development. As for individual differences between children, they have been discussed in those studies where they could not be avoided, but such variation has rarely been the focus of systematic attention. Differences between individual languages have been of great interest, but these differences have not often been placed in a framework of systematic typological variation. And although languages and their grammars change over time, the focus of attention on the individual child learner has generally led to neglect of explanatory principles that are best found on the level of linguistic diachrony, rather than the level of innate ideas or patterns of learning and cognition in the individual child. The chapter authors seek to explore these neglected contexts in more depth.

Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world’s languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions, large irregular inflectional paradigms, and bipartite stem verbs, which all pose interesting challenges to the learner, as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity, which broadly includes factors such as transparency, predictability/regularity, richness, type/token frequency and productivity, must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems.