Morphological acquisition in early infancy: Experimental and computational studies

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Morphological suffixes like English -s, -ed and -ing are basic building blocks of grammar. Limited use of morphological suffixes characterizes the speech of children with developmental disorders like SLI and autism. To promote language learning in typical and atypical populations, it is therefore necessary for us to understand how and when infants acquire morphology. This project is focused on investigating the beginnings of morphological acquisition in English and Spanish. By integrating experiments with infants as young as 6-months, corpus analysis and state-of-the-art computational modeling, this project seeks to establish when and how infants begin to acquire morphology. By additionally focusing on Spanish, a language in which the acquisition timetable is far less known than in English, this project will also increase access to participation in research activities. Integrating the behavioral and computational results from this project will shed light on the representations, time course of learning as well as mechanisms involved in the acquisition of morphology. Specifically, infant experiments will provide evidence for linguistic representations underlying morphological acquisition and document the developmental trajectory for the acquisition of morphological affixes. Next, using computational modeling, a morphological learner will be reverse engineered; its performance to be evaluate against the developmental trajectory of morphological acquisition uncovered in the infant experiments. Computational modeling will subsequently be used to pinpoint infant experiments that are most likely to distinguish between alternate theories; this is crucial particularly because infant research is time and resource intensive. Finally, as part of the project we anticipate generating a large, annotated corpus of infant-directed speech which will be publicly available for researchers investigating language acquisition.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.