Acquisition of morphological variation: The case of the English definite article

Abstract

Morphological systems have been pivotal in exploring cognitive mechanisms of language use and acquisition. Adult English definite article form preference seems to depend non-deterministically on multiple factors. A corpus study of adult spontaneous speech revealed similar patterns of variability. In an experiment, article variant preferences of three age groups were compared. Children were sensitive to the same phonological factors as adults, but showed effects of more limited experience with articulation and orthography. Preferences across age groups suggest developmental changes, but no evidence that children initially use a default form. Corpus studies of children's and adults’ speech also revealed no evidence for a default. The results point to overgeneralisation of both article variants, resulting from extended competition between variant forms.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Army Research Institute Contract DASW01-03-K-0002 and Army Research Office Grant W9112NF-05-1-0153 to the University of Colorado.

Notes

¹The normative rule thus excludes uses of the for emphasis (e.g., ‘it's not just one solution, it's the solution’) or as a signal of production difficulty (Fox Tree & Clark, 1997). The normative rule for the indefinite article excludes exceptional use of ‘an’ before ‘h’-initial words with second syllable stress.

²Raymond (2003) reports that there was a high degree of confusability among transcribers in the transcription of the reduced vowel variants. Because fronting, which might be indicated by transcription of a fronted reduced vowel, cannot be reliably determined from the transcription of the reduced vowels, all reduced variants were treated as reduced in the present study.

³See, for example, the diachronic account of the English verb system by Hare and Elman (1995).