Analyze a child’s language in terms of its morphological

Overview: Analyze a child’s language in terms of its morphological and syntactic structure to gain insights about grammatical development in general. Organize your findings into tables, and explain your findings and then describes how these findings fit into your future field. The child-language transcript has been provided for you.

Child Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RLN7r5jdghSPxFih0V4bHrF3I0u9c2MddgjW4iX1iII/edit

Here is a step-by-step list to help guide you through the project:

Step 1 (MLU): Calculate the child’s MLU. (Note: You should not count the mother’s utterances!) You will come across some challenging lines where you will have to make decisions on whether or not to count some of the morphemes- when that happens, write it down so you will be able to explain and defend your MLU calculation!

Step 2 (Grammatical Stage of Development):Use your MLU to find out which Stage of Grammatical Development the child is in. Do some research about what sorts of things you expect the child to be working on linguistically during this stage. (Keep a list of your sources.)

STEP 3 (Analysis of Brown’s 14 grammatical morphemes): Go through the child’s utterances and make a “corrected version” of any ungrammatical utterances. (Note: not all of the utterances will need to be corrected!) Using the “corrected sentences,” to help you think about which of Brown’s 14 grammatical morphemes must be present for each utterance to be grammatical. Then think about whether the child has used them or not. Organize these findings into a table. In the “Obligatory Context” column, you will mark the utterance number where a particular grammatical morpheme was needed for the sentence to be grammatical. Under the “Occurrences” column, you will mark whether or not the child used the grammatical morpheme. (This is a huge task, and I don’t recommend you do it all in one sitting. When I did the analysis, I started by first searching for -ing, and then I went back to look for “in” and “on.” Next, I looked for plural -s… so on and so forth.) Finally, calculate the percentage of times the child correctly produces the morpheme in a context where it is required by dividing the number of occurrences by the number of obligatory contexts. (Ex. If the child uttered 4 utterances where the -ing was needed for the sentence to be grammatical, you will have a 4 in the “obligatory contexts” cell. If the child used the -ing in only 2 of the utterances, you will have a 2 in the “occurrences” cell. 2/4 = .5 and so you will put a 50% in the “% correct” cell.

Table I. Brown’s 14 grammatical morphemes

STEP 4 (Analysis of mood): For each of the child’s utterances, determine what the mood is. Organize your findings by writing the utterance number into the following table.

Table II. Mood

STEP 5 (Analysis of Stage of negation OR question development- you may just choose one!) Choose to analyze either negation development or interrogative development. Indicate which lines include a negation OR a question (depending upon which item you decide to analyze.) Include these in the table according to the stage they represent. Note: not every child utterance will contain a negation or interrogative!

Table III. Stage of Negation Development

Stage of Negation Development

Table IV. Stage of Question Development

Stage of Question Development

STEP 6 (Analysis of advanced sentence structures): Go through the child’s utterances and determine if they fits the description for one of the sentence types/structures that we discussed during class. (NOTE: Not every utterance forms a clause, and so some utterances will need to be skipped!) Organize your findings by writing the line number of the utterance in a table.

Table V. Advanced Sentence Structures

STEP 8 (Write your analytical paper)

Write about your findings in an analytical paper.

• Introduction

Give a general description of the interaction you are analyzing and state the purpose for your analysis.  Describe the analyses that were performed and provide a summary of the results.

• Body

Discuss your results, referring to the concepts we have covered in this course (both in lectures and in the readings).  You will present your results in your tables in an appendix.  By doing so, you will not have to list countless examples in the body of your paper.  In other words, provide examples to illustrate the points you are making in your discussion but present the main results of your analyses in the tables in the appendix.

You may use sub-headings to organize the discussion of your findings.  Organize your discussion according to the topic.  After conducting your analyses, decide how to best organize your results.  For example, when you discuss the child’s syntactic development, you may focus on yes/no question formation before you discuss his abilities to construct wh-questions.  Please do not provide a running commentary on the transcript.

Don’t forget that when writing up your analysis, it is just as important to address cells within your tables that are empty as it is to address those that have numbers in them.

• Conclusion

Present a summary of your findings and try to connect them to larger issues in child language acquisition. (You may want to provide information about what you would do to help this child continue to advance… what sorts of materials would you be looking for?)

• Works Cited
• Appendices

Present your analysis in tables and put the tables in the appendix at the end.