The impact of inflectional awareness on syntactic bootstrapping and fast mapping of novel verbs in English, Filipino, and Chabacano

• Main Author: Concepcion, Claribel C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2003
• Subjects: Semantics; Grammar, Comparative and general—Inflection; Grammar, Comparative and general—Morphology; Language and languages; Chabacano language; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/936; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1935/viewcontent/TG03565_F_Partial.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

To utilize morphological cues for syntactic bootstrapping, language learners must recognize that inflectionally varying words are instances of the same word. Children who are exposed to languages with richer inflectional morphologies than English and Chabacano, such as Filipino, experience instances of inflectional variation often. As a result, they may learn to recognize inflectionally varying words as instances of the same words at an earlier age than do learners of Chabacano and English. In the present investigation, Filipino-English- and Chabacano-English-speaking children aged 46-81 months were taught novel verbs in fast mapping tasks under two conditions: no inflectional variation, in which inflections did not vary between test and exposure (e.g. neps, neps) and inflectional variation in which inflections alternated between exposure and testing (e.g. neps, nepped). This kind of procedure was aimed at examining the Filipino bilingual children's ability to fast map, their morphological awareness and ability to use the syntactic bootstrapping mechanism to narrow down the referents of novel verbs, and their bootstrapping capability in relation to age and level of vocabulary development. Results revealed that the bilingual children were able to fast map the novel verbs presented to them in their two languages. They were also aware of the inflectional morphemes conjoined with the target novel verbs and used these as syntactic cues to narrow down the referents of novel verbs. This was indicated by the significant effect in the two conditions that were examined. There was also a significant difference in the performance between the Filipino-English- and Chabacano-English-speaking children but the bootstrapping ability of the children did not correlate with age but related to children's level of vocabulary development. These findings intimate that exposure to languages with richer morphologies can facilitate children's recognition of inflectional morphemes and enable them to parse the stem and the inflection.