Inflectional morphology in cri du chat syndrome – A case study

Abstract

This study examined morphological skills in a girl with cri du chat syndrome, addressing three questions: (1) To what extent does the subject inflect words? (2) To what extent are words inflected correctly? (3) To what extent do the inflected words reflect productive morphological rules, and to what extent can they be considered to be rote-learned? The study draws on two sources of data: a corpus of spontaneous utterances collected when the subject was 14 years old and her performance on a past tense elicitation test at 11;10 and 16;5. It was found that most inflectional forms in the nominal, verbal, pronominal and adjectival paradigms of the target language were attested in the corpus. These forms were in all but a few instances inflected correctly. The most frequent inflection errors were infinitive for present, past or past participle in verbs and wrong gender in determiners. Furthermore, performance on the elicitation test indicated some knowledge of productive inflectional rules of the target language, despite relatively poor phonetic, phonological and syntactic skills.

• cri du chat syndrome
• morphological skills
• past tense

Acknowledgements

This study was first presented at the 13th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association conference in Oslo in June 2010; the author is indebted to the audience for their comments and discussions. She also thanks Hans-Olav Enger, Nina Gram Garmann, Marianne Lind, Inger Moen and Hanne Gram Simonsen for valuable comments and suggestions. Finally, she thanks the two anonymous Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics (CLP)Please provide the expansion, if applicable, for ICPLA and CLP. reviewers for their generous and detailed comments on two versions of the article.

Declaration of interest: The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. There is also a present participle form, which due to its marginality in the system is not included here.

2. Since 9;4 the author has not followed her phonetic and phonological development systematically, but in general her skills in these areas have not developed much since then.

3. Even though the subject’s processing skills are measured at two different times, it is difficult from these two measures to ascertain whether any differences represent a true development or only random variation.

4. The focus on inflectional morphology comes as a natural consequence of the almost total lack of derivational forms and compounds in the corpus.

5. The notion of obligatory context was developed in Brown (1973) and can be defined as a context in a language where an adult native speaker according to the grammar of this language would have to use a particular inflectional form.

6. Gaps like these are most likely accidental.

7. For details on how the verbs with high and low token frequency were selected, see Ragnarsdóttir et al. (1999: 596f.).

8. In one of these cases, gynge–hang, for gynge–gynga, there is a possibility that Hanna confuses the verb gynge with henge ‘hang’, with the past tense form hang. On the other hand, since Hanna saw a picture showing an act of rocking, and not hanging, and the input was the present tense form gynger, and not henger, there is little reason to believe that that was the case.

9. One of the reviewers asks to what extent this reliance on rote-learning could be supported by observations regarding other requisite cognitive skills such as memory and pattern detection that might be relatively preserved in this syndrome. To the author’s knowledge there are no studies that examine cognitive skills in CCS in enough detail to address this issue appropriately (however, see Cornish et al. (1999) for some general information). The question will, however, be an obvious starting point for further research.