The effect of inflectional variation on fast mapping of verbs

Syntactic bootstrapping accounts propose that young children use syntactic frames and morphological markers to narrow down the possible referents upon initial exposure to a word. One challenge that children face, however, is that words may be inflected differently from one presentation to the next (e.g., “push,” “pushed”). If children do not recognize morphological markers as separable elements, they may treat inflectional variations of the same word as different words. In languages with richer inflectional morphologies than English, such as Spanish, this problem of interpreting instances of inflectional variation must be confronted more frequently. Thus, these children may learn to recognize inflectional variations as instances of the same word at an earlier age than do children acquiring English. The question addressed in this study, then, was whether English- and Spanish-learning children are influenced by inflectional variation when learning new verbs, and whether this influence is the same in the two languages. This question was assessed with a fast mapping task in which the inflections that appeared with new words were manipulated to determine if a child recognized a novel word under no-inflectional variation and inflectional variation conditions. In the no-variation condition, English- and Spanish-speaking three-year-olds identified the novel verbs with 70% and 65% accuracy, respectively. These response levels were above the level expected by chance. However, in the inflectional variation condition both groups\u27 performance dropped to chance levels. English- and Spanish-speaking three-year-olds identified the novel verbs with 48% and 45% accuracy, respectively. Thus, it seems that neither group of children was able to parse the stem and inflectional marker to consistently associate the inflectionally varying forms of the novel verbs presented during the fast mapping task. Even for children acquiring languages with relatively rich verbal inflection paradigms the transition from production to full comprehension of forms may be an extended one