Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, 3125 Campbell Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543, USA.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2011 Feb;54(1):55-71. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2010/10-0056). Epub 2010 Aug 12.
Two-year-olds produce third person singular -s more accurately on verbs in sentence-final position as compared with verbs in sentence-medial position. This study was designed to determine whether these sentence-position effects can be explained by perceptual factors.
For this purpose, the authors compared 22- and 27-month-olds' perception and elicited production of third person singular -s in sentence-medial versus-final position. The authors assessed perception by measuring looking/listening times to a 1-screen display of a cartoon paired with a grammatical versus an ungrammatical sentence (e.g., She eats now vs. She eat now).
Children at both ages demonstrated sensitivity to the presence/absence of this inflectional morpheme in sentence-final, but not sentence-medial, position. Children were also more accurate at producing third person singular -s sentence finally, and production accuracy was predicted by vocabulary measures as well as by performance on the perception task.
These results indicate that children's more accurate production of third person singular -s in sentence-final position cannot be explained by articulatory factors alone but that perceptual factors play an important role in accounting for early patterns of production. The findings also indicate that perception and production of inflectional morphemes may be more closely related than previously thought.
两岁的儿童在句末位置比在句中位置更准确地产生第三人称单数 -s。本研究旨在确定这些句子位置效应是否可以用感知因素来解释。
为此，作者比较了 22 个月和 27 个月大的儿童对句中位置和句末位置的第三人称单数 -s 的感知和诱发产生。作者通过测量对一个 1 屏幕的卡通显示与一个语法正确和一个语法不正确的句子（例如，She eats now 与 She eat now）的注视/聆听时间来评估感知。
两个年龄段的儿童都对句末位置的这个屈折词素的存在/不存在表现出敏感性，但在句中位置则不然。儿童在句末位置也更准确地产生第三人称单数 -s，并且生产准确性可以通过词汇量测量以及感知任务的表现来预测。
这些结果表明，儿童在句末位置更准确地产生第三人称单数 -s 不能仅用发音因素来解释，感知因素在解释早期的产生模式方面起着重要作用。研究结果还表明，屈折词素的感知和产生可能比以前认为的更为密切相关。
