Past Marking Research Articles

Does past tense marking indicate the acquisition of the concept of temporal displacement in children's cognitive development?

The acquisition of past tense markers has often been considered to parallel conceptual development in the domain of time (e.g., Weist, 1986). However, the precise relationship between linguistic marking of time in childrenís speech and conceptual development has not been investigated in data-based research. This study analyses longitudinal speech data from four Japanese children to determine whether the use of the past tense form actually coincides with its use to signal past time. The results show that the relationship between contrastive use of the form and truly deictic past is not a straightforward one; for all the children, deictic use emerges later than the contrastive use of past and nonpast forms.

Comprehension of past tense marking in Greek developmental dyslexia: language impairment or processing deficit?

Comprehension of past tense marking in Greek developmental dyslexia: language impairment or processing deficit?

Language learning

Language learning

The selective marking of past tense: insights from Indian learners of English

This study examines the selective marking of past tense in the narrative prose of low intermediate-level Indian learners of English as a second language who use Hindi or Urdu as their first languag ...

The emergence of the imperfect in Spanish as a foreign language: The association between imperfective morphology and state verbs

This descriptive study analyzed the emergence of the imperfect in the written production of 30 beginning learners of Spanish. The analysis focused on the use of the imperfect and the morphological marking of state verbs. The results follow the patterns predicted by the aspect hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994), and support some refinements of the proposed stages of spread of the imperfect across aspectual classes. A detailed analysis of the category of state verbs showed that these verbs do not behave as a homogeneous category with regard to past tense marking. The possibility of the application of associative mechanisms of learning (Pinker and Prince 1994) was explored based on the past tense marking of irregular and regular verbs in connection to the stages of acquisition proposed by the aspect hypothesis, but not enough evidence was found to strongly support the application of such learning mechanisms.

Differentiating SLI from ADHD using children's sentence recall and production of past tense morphology

Measures of sentence recall and past tense marking were used to examine the similarities and differences between children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing (TD) children. Both SLI and ADHD group means for sentence recall tasks were significantly lower than the TD control group (SLI<ADHD<TD). In contrast, limitations in past tense marking were characteristic of the SLI group (SLI<ADHD = TD). Frequent affix omissions or bare stem errors (e.g. the girl colour the picture; the girl fall in the net) differentiated the SLI group from the other two groups. Over‐regularization errors (e.g. the girl falled into the net) did not (SLI = ADHD = TD). Clinical implications are discussed.

Past Tense Marking in Afrikaans

The system of past tense marking in Afrikaans provides empirical evidence for the need for scope underspecification and multiple exponency of semantic operators within the system of compositional semantics. Lexical Resource Semantics (LRS, Richter and Sailer 2003) has incorporated these two features, allowing for a straightforward account of the data.

Revisiting the comparative fallacy: a reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker, 2001

In a recent airing of methodological concerns in the analysis of spontaneous speech samples, Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001) suggest that Lardiere (1998a) should have carried out analyses of lexical aspect and discourse grounding in determining obligatory contexts for past tense marking. Failure to do so, they argue, renders the work in question susceptible to the comparative fallacy (Bley-Vroman, 1983). In this reply I would like to briefly address some of the problems with that argument, while showing that such analyses could themselves introduce a comparative fallacy problem.

Evaluating the morphological competence of children with severe speech and physical impairments.

Reports present mixed findings on the extent to which the development of receptive language skills in children with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) is compromised by their difficulty with speaking (V. W. Berninger & B. M. Gans, 1986; D. V. M. Bishop, B. Byers Brown, & J. Robson, 1990; O. Udwin & W. Yule, 1990). In this study, grammaticality judgments were used to measure the sensitivity of 4 school-age children with SSPI to different morphological errors. These errors included violations of agreement between the subject and auxiliary verbs (e.g., she are falling), the marking of aspect (e.g., she is play the horn), and the marking of past tense on regular and irregular verbs (e.g., he jump, he fall, he falled). Performance of the participants with SSPI was compared to groups of typically developing children and adults. Results indicated that children in the SSPI and control groups made similar judgments. All groups showed high levels of sensitivity to agreement violations, aspect-marking errors, and tense-marking errors involving irregular verbs. Participants with SSPI had greater difficulty detecting tense-marking errors involving regular verbs. Implications for improving clinical assessments within this population are discussed.

Past tense morphology in specifically language impaired and normally developing children

This study evaluates the input-processing deficit/single system and the grammar-specific deficit/dual system models to account for past tense formation in impaired and normal language development. We investigated regular and irregular past tense formation of 60 real and novel regular and irregular verbs in "Grammatical (G)-SLI" children (aged 9:3 to 12:10) and morphological- or vocabulary-matched younger control children. The G-SLI children and language ability (LA) controls showed quantitatively and qualitatively different patterns of performance. The LA controls, but not the G-SLI children, showed a significant advantage of regular over irregular past tense marking for real and novel verbs. Past tense frequency affected the GSLI children, but not the controls' production of regular verbs, even with stem access controlled for. The G-SLI children's production of regular forms was significantly lower than that of the control groups. Frequency and phonological properties had a similar and significant effect on the G-SLI and LA controls' irregular formation. The G-SLI children's irregular past tense production did not differ from that of the morphological controls, but was lower than that of the vocabulary controls. We argue that the dual mechanism/grammar-specific deficit provides a parsimonious explanation for normal and impaired performance, and suggest that grammatical computations underlying regular past tense formation in normal grammar are impaired (not missing) in G-SLI grammar.

Acquisition of irregular past tense by children with specific language impairment.

In this paper we add to what is known about the tense-marking limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) by exploring the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense, encompassing the age range of 2;6 to 8;9 (years;months) and comparing the performance of 21 children with SLI to that of 23 control children of the same age and 20 younger control children of equivalent mean length of utterance (MLU) at the outset. The analysis differentiated between the morphophonological component of past tense marking and the morphosyntactic component (finiteness). In the morphosyntactic component, the performance of the SLI group trails that of the two control groups over 3.5 years, whereas in the morphophonological component, the SLI group's performance is equivalent to that of the younger controls. Models of growth curves for regular past tense and irregular finiteness marking show the same pattern, with linear and quadratic components and the child's MLU at the outset as the only predictor. For morphophonological growth the picture changes, with an interaction of linear trend and MLU and the child's receptive vocabulary emerging as a predictor. The findings support a morphosyntactic model, such as the extended optional infinitive (EOI) model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children.

Language and cognitive development in a grammatical sli boy: Modularity and innateness

This paper aims to provide insight into the contentious issue of the hypothesised innate basis to domain specific, modular aspects of language [Fodor, F.J., The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983; Chomsky, N., Lectures on government and binding. Foris, Dordrecht, 1981]. In order to do this a distinction is made between modular language abilities, non-modular language abilities (i.e. language abilities outside the language module in question) and non-linguistic cognitive tasks. Based on this distinction, a series of investigations were carried out into the abilities of a 10 year old boy (AZ) with Grammatical specific language impairment. The investigations of modular language abilities focused on inflectional morphology (agreement, and regular and irregular past tense marking) and syntax (knowledge and use of phrase structure, thematic role assignment and Binding Principles). The investigations of non-modular language abilities included tests of pragmatic inference and verbal analogical reasoning. Non-linguistic assessments included standardised tests and a test of visual transitive inference. A clear dissociation was revealed between AZ's severely impaired modular language abilities and good non-modular and non-linguistic abilities. AZ's performance on the tests was compared with 36 younger language control children (aged 5:4–8:9) and 12 age matched control children. Z-scores computed for AZ's performance in comparison with the normal children, based on standardised language measures (vocabulary, morphology) and his chronological age, revealed a significant impairment in morpho-syntactic abilities and normal or above average abilities on the non-modular language tasks and non-linguistic cognitive tasks. I propose that the discreteness of AZ's language impairment indicates that an underlying modular language impairment is the most parsimonious explanation for his deficit. A deficit with syntactic structural representations characterised by the Representational Deficit for Dependent Relationships [van der Lely, H.K.J. and Stollwerck, L., Binding theory and specifically language impaired children. Cognition, 1997.]can account for his morphological and syntactic impairments. The data provide empirical evidence to support the innate bases to domain specific and modular aspects of language.

Learner hypothesis and past tense marking in Vietnamese English

ABSTRACT: A number of recent studies on tense in L2 have claimed that the past tense is acquired in developmental stages: verbs, such as ‘build’ and ‘work,’ which are lexico‐aspectually more event‐like (less state‐like) are claimed to be marked for past tense earlier in the developmental process than those, such as ‘be’ and ‘want,’ which are less event‐like (more state‐like). In this paper, I will closely examine seven samples of writing by L1 speakers of Vietnamese to show that grounding, rather than lexical aspect, properly accounts for the selective marking of past tense. I will suggest that the learner‐hypothesis that governs this use of English past tense derives from the transference of a grounding‐marking principle from a tense‐free language, and I will briefly address the pedagogical implications of this finding.

Diachronic factors in the grammaticalization of counterfactual implicatures in Singaporean English

Previous research on the variation in past tense marking in Singaporean English has discussed Bickerton's ‘Bioprogram Hypothesis’ (Bickerton, Roots of language. Karoma Publishers Inc., Ann Arbor, 1981) as a possible explanation for the preference for punctual aspect to be marked for past in such dialects. The present study considers this explanation in the light of recent grammaticalization studies, and with statistical data investigates the relation between past tense marking and the development of implicatures of counterfactuality in a selected sample of educated Singaporean English. It is shown that not only substratum features, but important factors pertaining to diachronic processes in the grammatic-alization of past tense are likely to play a significant role in determining the degree to which counterfactual implicatures are perceived in such varieties.

Verb class distinctions and AAC language-encoding limitations.

This study explored the status of an English grammatical distinction in the language of individuals who have never been able to encode that distinction previously. English past tense marking was used as a context to examine regular and irregular verb class distinctions in the language of two adults with severe congenital physical impairments who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems to communicate. In the subjects' lexically based AAC systems, past tense was marked on regular verbs and irregular verbs using the same strategy. The subjects accessed their AAC displays using four-digit eye gaze number codes. They were shown a novel affixation strategy through manipulation of the four-digit codes that allowed them to mark past tense on regular verbs via an affixation process. Their semantic strategy for marking past tense on irregular verbs was not changed. The subjects' patterns of use of the two strategies on exemplars of each verb class revealed limited evidence of distinctive use of the two strategies based on verb class membership. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis and Singaporean English

In his rather controversial book "Roots of Language" 1981, Bickerton claims that 'many of the prerequisites for human language were laid down in the course of mammalian evolution, and that the most critical of those prerequisites... was the capacity to construct quite elaborate mental representations of the external world....' (Bickerton 1981:294-295). The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH) concerns 'a biological' or 'a species-specific program for language, genetically coded and expressed in ways still largely myste rious, in the structures and modes of operation of the human brain' (Bickerton 1984:173). Among the important distinctions of the LBH are those between state and process, punctual and non-punctual, specific and non-specific and causative and non-causative. Such dis tinctions are clearly evident when a pidgin becomes a creole. The in nate punctual/non-punctual distinction is manifested in Bickerton's investigation of past tense marking in 2 decreolizing situations- Guyana and Hawaii. Verbs which were used non-punctually received a lower marking for past tense than verbs that were used punctually. What are the factors which influence variation in past tense marking of Chinese Singaporeans? The substratum language may have a strong influence since in Chinese there is no morphological change to the past form of the verb. Or it could be that the innate Language Bioprogram has an influence as well. Naturally, other fac tors such as teaching and general language learning strategies cannot be ignored. This paper is based on an empirical investigation of recordings of spontaneous speech of a hundred ethnically Chinese Singaporeans who have had English-medium education and discusses variation in past tense marking in Singaporean English as well as pedagogical im plications of the LBH for second language acquisition.

The nature of indigenized Englishes: Interference — Creativity — Universals

The concept of indigenized or “New” Englishes is first examined and a comparison is made with pidgins and creoles. Brief mention is also made of differences in the functional range of indigenized varieties of English in various countries. Because these varieties exhibit differences from “native” varieties in syntax, semantics, lexicon and phonology, they have naturally been considered as products of L1 interference. In many respects this is so. For example, the basilectal English of some members of the majority of the Chinese community of Singapore is often typologically closer to Chinese than to English. There have been some objections that these “New” varieties are not merely fossilized interlanguages but display creativity. The evidence provided is usually of a lexical nature. Many of these varieties do display interesting creativity but it is often difficult to determine whether innovations are genuinely creative or the result of mishearing, calques from local languages, official terms or relics from the colonial past. In any case, creativity cannot explain phonological and syntactic differences. Recently, it has been found that some, if not all, indigenized varieties of English also show evidence of language universals, not merely universal learning strategies but universals of a deeper semantic type. The evidence presented does not necessarily support Bickerton's “bioprogram” nor his claims about the development of creoles (Bickerton 1981 : Roots of Language, Ann Arbor: Karoma). However, the data on past tense marking in Singaporean English cannot easily be explained by L1 interference, universal learning strategies or by creativity. Research on “New Englishes” requires a complex paradigm combining different viewpoints, comparison across varieties and joint projects by speakers of “native” and indigenized varieties.

How children talk about what happened

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the development of past tense expressions in the speech of children from 1; 6 to 2; 6. It is shown that this development depends crucially on the child's cognitive construction of the time dimension, as described by Piaget (1954, 1971). In this process two different cognitive routes are followed, depending on the type of event the child has to encode. Past events resulting in the end state of some object are gradually grasped and encoded by means of a practical process–effect coordination. Past states and activities, on the contrary, i.e. past events that do not result in an end state, are referred to through a more primitive distinction between a pretend vs. a real world. This difference is formally reflected in the differential past-tense marking appearing on verbs which describe the two different types of event.