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Induction and the acquisition of English auxiliaries: the effects of differentially enriched input*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Marilyn Shatz ,
Erika Hoff-Ginsberg  and
Douglas Maciver
Marilyn Shatz*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Erika Hoff-Ginsberg
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Douglas Maciver
Affiliation:
University of California Los Angeles
*
Human Performance Center, 330 Packard Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, USA.
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Abstract

Children aged 2;0 to 2;6 participated in a longitudinal study examining their acquisition of the English auxiliary system following a six-week period in which they were exposed to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Groups of children received enrichment utterances with the auxiliary could either in first position in the sentence, in middle position, or in both positions. Children in the front position group were significantly advanced over the other experimental groups in acquiring modal auxiliaries but not non-modals. However, none of the experimental groups differed significantly from a baseline group which received no additional could input. The implications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms of auxiliary acquisition and the nature of children's grammatical categories are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 1989 , pp. 121 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported in part by NIMH grant MH30996 to the first author and by NIH traineeships to the second and third authors under grant HD07109. We thank Melissa Bowerman and Susan Gelman for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

References

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