Functional morphemes and mechanisms of early language processing

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Infants face many challenges during early language development. Spoken words are not separated by blank spaces. Infants must find word forms from running speech, much like the challenge we face when we first hear a foreign language. In addition, infants must classify words into grammatical categories such as nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc. They also need to map word forms to appropriate meanings. These tasks are not trivial because parents provide neither explicit lessons, nor overt feedback to infants. Based on the theory that I have proposed, the solution to these problems may lie in the processing of function morphemes (such as auxiliaries, articles, etc). These elements are extremely frequent in the language and have distinct spoken forms when compared to content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). Previous research including studies from my research group showed that infants during the first year of life can perceive function morphemes and use these items to find words from running speech. As part of my long-term NSERC program, the proposed research will test the hypothesis that infants rely on function morphemes to break into early language. We will examine the role of function morphemes in infants' initial learning of morphological parsing (for example, the interpretation of word roots and suffixes), grammatical categorisation of words, and mapping of meanings to word forms. In doing so, we will specifically investigate the interactions of different learning mechanisms (for example, frequency versus prosodically based learning) associated with function morphemes, and attempt to determine the influence of the native language to infants' initial biases. These studies may contribute to the fundamental debate on the nature-nurture question in language acquisition.