Early words—a few facts about the acquisition of word for children

有关儿童语言习得的话题：词类习得的顺序

When we discuss the acquisition of words for the children, we will ask this question:

What’s the order of acquisition for word categories?

As far as major lexical categories go, children’s early production vocabularies exhibit a preponderance of nouns, typically used to refer to objects in the child’s immediate environment (e.g. mummy, daddy, dolly, car).Alongside these, children are often quick to develop a small number of ‘general purpose’ verb (Radford et al 1999/2000: 212).

In a study of the 1970s, Roger Brown and his colleagues at Harvard reported the results of their detailed longitudinal work with three children. It included a number of verbal inflections within which Brown distinguished between regular and irregular past tense inflections (as in jumped and came) and between regular and irregular third person singular present (walks, does). His research shows that the verbal inflections were acquired as the following orders:

1) progressive –ing

2) past tense irregular

3) past tense regular

4) third person singular present regular

5) third person singular present irregular (cf. Radford et al 1999/2000: 215)

This reason for the progressive morpheme coming first is its regularity. Unlike the past tense and third person singular morphemes, the progressive morpheme has no variation realizations as allomorphs. As a verbal suffix, it attaches in a fixed form to the vast majority of English verbs, and this, coupled with its relatively transparent semantics in signaling ongoing activities, may be sufficient to account for its accessibility to children.

(这里我保留一种疑问：对于中国学习者来说，动词过去时的不规则变化与规则变化的习得顺序，是否不同于英语母语学习者？Of course, Brown et al 1999/2000:216 present their suspicions and observations on this order of acquisition:

First, the irregular forms, while relatively small in number, include some of the most frequently occurring verbs in English (was, had, came, went, brought, took, etc.).

Second, the regular patterns does indeed prevail but only after a period during which the irregular forms are correctly produced.