An Exploration of Past Tense Marking and Lexical Aspect
Brian K. Weiler w C. Melanie Schuele
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Past tense verb marking emerges during the preschool years. By
the age of five, children with typical language skills mark finiteness
on regular and irregular past tense at levels approaching mastery
(Rice & Wexler, 1996; Rice, Wexler, Marquis & Hershberger, 2000).
Prior to mastery, young children sometimes produce bare verb
stems (e.g.,play) in contexts where inflected forms (e.g., played) are
obligatory in the adult language. Potential influences on partial past
tense marking previously investigated include lexical frequency,
phonological composition, and neighborhood structure (Marchman,
Welteck, & Wesimer, 1999), phonotactic probability (Leonard,
Davis, & Deevy, 2007), sentence position (Dalal & Loeb, 2005) and,
of present interest, lexical aspect (Johnson & Fey, 2006; Johnson &
Morris, 2007). Lexical aspect relates to the temporal properties of
events individual verbs describe (Li & Shirai, 2000).
Fifty-two preschool children aged 37 to 61 months participated in the
current study. These children were identified from a broader pool of
100 children with typical language skills (see Table 2). Participants
were selected for variable past tense marking across sixteen elicited
past tense verb targets (i.e., at least one marked and one omitted in
obligatory contexts). All children produced word final /d/ and /t/ on a
phonological probe. The children were recruited from four preschools.
Demographic information received from 83% of the final participant
pool indicated that 98% of the children had at least one parent with a
college education and that 98% were Caucasian. All participants were
monolingual speakers of mainstream English dialect.
whether an event takes Hme to occur [+ duraHve] or occurs instantaneously [-­‐ duraHve]. dynamic whether an event involves moHon [+ dynamic] or is a state [ -­‐ dynamic].
whether an event has a specified endpoint [+ telic] or an undefined endpoint [ -­‐ telic].
telic Table 2. LEXICAL ASPECT CATEGORIES
Category State AcHvity Accomplishment Achievement Temporal proper2es [+ duraHve] [-­‐ dynamic] [-­‐ telic] [+ duraHve] [+ dynamic] [-­‐ telic] [+ duraHve] [+ dynamic] [+ telic] Example u7erances I wanted it. She rode the horse. He 1ed his shoes. Age in Months 48.94 7.01 PPVT-­‐III SS 110.48 11.31 PLS-­‐4 Total SS 116.61 13.07 METHODS
The study involved secondary analysis of data collected for an
investigation of complex syntax in typical language learners (Schuele,
2006). Child responses to 16 verb targets from the past tense probe of
the Rice/Wexler Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI; Rice &
Wexler, 2001) were analyzed. The 16 TEGI verb targets were selected
for their lexical aspect categorization as either Accomplishment or
Achievement using Shirai and Anderson’s (1995) coding scheme.
Table 3. VERB TARGETS BY CATEGORY
Achievement kick, jump, catch, blow, li;, give [-­‐ duraHve] [+ dynamic] [+ telic] She blew out the candle. Brown (1973) observed that young children first mark past tense for
Achievements like fell, dropped, slipped, crashed, and broke “which
name events of such brief duration that the event is almost certain
to have ended before one can speak” (p. 334). Follow-up analyses
of Brown’s Adam and Eve language samples, at ages 2;3 and 1;6
respectively, show that 94-100% of past tense marking was for
Achievements. Bloom, Lifter, and Hafitz (1980) likewise reported
that young children’s use of past tense overwhelmingly occurred
when referencing completed events of instantaneous duration.
Johnson and Fey (2006) found that two-year-olds with typical
language imitate past tense morphology with higher accuracy for
Accomplishments than Activities. The temporal distinction between
Accomplishments and Activities relates to telicity. Leonard et al.
(2007) found that, in an elicitation probe, three-year-olds with typical
language mark regular past tense with greater accuracy for
Achievements than Activities. The temporal distinction between
Achievements and Activities relates to telicity and duration. It is
unclear whether the facilitative advantage in marking past tense for
Activities when compared to Achievements was related more to the
property of telicity or duration. To answer this question, a
comparison of past tense marking for Achievements versus
Accomplishments, both of which are + telic, is required.
♦ The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of the
durative property on past tense marking among typical
preschoolers who have not mastered past tense morphology.
♦ Accuracies in marking past tense where inflected forms were
obligatory were compared across Achievements and
Accomplishments.
90
Accomplishment clean, climb, made, write, paint, pick, eat, brush, plant, 1e Task: The TEGI past tense probe is comprised of picture sets used to
elicit regular and irregular past tense verbs. For each item, an
examiner showed the child two pictures, one of an action in progress
and the other of the same action completed. The examiner described
the first picture using the target verb in a present progressive context
(e.g., Here the boy is cleaning her room.). Then, the child was asked to
describe the second, completed action picture using the prompt, Now
he/she is done. Tell me what he/she did. The child was prompted to
respond with a complete sentence, including a subject.
Data Analysis: For the purposes of this study, only those responses
containing the target verb in an obligatory context for past tense were
coded for analysis (see Table 4). Correctly marked regular and
irregular verbs were given credit. Verbs taking irregular past tense
forms (e.g., blow) that were marked with regular past tense
overgeneralizations of either the bare stem (e.g., blowed) or the past
tense form itself (e.g., blewed) were also given credit. Kuczac (1977)
found that such past tense overgeneralization errors are produced by
children who have already demonstrated stable control of the regular
past tense rule. Responses containing the bare stem of the target verb
in an obligatory context for past tense (e.g., She clean her room.) were
not given credit. Interscorer reliability was 90%.
Table 4. CREDITED CHILD RESPONSES
Correct regular or irregular past He kicked. She made.
Over-­‐regularizaHon of irregular past She maded.
Regular past over-­‐marked He jumped-ed
Irregular bare stem over-­‐marked She catched-ed
Irregular past over-­‐marked She caughted-ed
Achievement 80
70
blow jump 60
Percent Marked 91.7 90.0 50
catch 87.5 40
kick 81.6 30
give 72.5 li,* 20
16.1 10
0
* = alveolar bare stem verb
Achievement
Accomplishment
Accomplishment Percent Marked made 92.3 1e 91.7 pick 90.7 climb 87.8 clean 80.5 brush 80.0 eat* 76.6 paint* 62.2 plant* 57.6 write* 51.4 Main Finding
Total past tense marking accuracies were similar across Lexical
Aspect categories differing on the durative property. (n = 52 children)
Achievement Verbs: 75.55% (173/229)
Accomplishment Verbs: 76.94% (307/399)
Figure 2. AGE 3 ACCURACY
Figure 3. AGE 4 ACCURACY
100
100
90
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
10
0
0
Achievement
Accomplishment
Achievement
Accomplishment
76.56%
76.19%
(n = 28 children)
73.68%
76.54%
(n = 23 children)
Figure 4. NON-ALVEOLAR PAST TENSE ACCURACY
100
90
Percent Marked for Past Tense
duraHve SD Table 5. PERCENT ACCURACIES BY VERB
100
Table 3. PARTICIPANT CHARACTERISTICS
Mean RESULTS
Figure1. OVERALL PAST TENSE ACCURACY
Percent Marked for Past Tense
Table 1. TEMPORAL PROPERTIES DEFINED
RESULTS
Percent Marked for Past Tense
PARTICIPANTS
Percent Marked for Past Tense
INTRODUCTION
DISCUSSION
The findings of this study suggest that the instantaneous property of
Achievements does not provide a facilitative advantage over the
durative property of Accomplishments in past tense marking among
typical preschool children who have not mastered past tense
morphology. Similar overall accuracies in past tense marking were
found across the two lexical aspect categories under investigation.
This similarity was also found at individual age levels and when
alveolar bare stem verbs, found presently and in previous studies
(e.g., Marchman, 1997) to be more susceptible to zero-marking for
past tense, were excluded.
Prior work (e.g., Brown 1973) indicates that early emerging
spontaneous past tense productions frequently occur with
Achievements. This is speculated to be due to the prototypical way
in which verbs describing Achievements characterize visible events
completed rather instantly. The present results suggest that the
temporal property of Achievements implicated in facilitating early
emerging past tense productions is not facilitative of later
preschool-aged past tense marking above and beyond the
previously documented effects of telicity (Leonard et al. 2007).
Considering the current findings alongside prior investigations of
lexical aspect and past tense marking, it seems that typical
preschoolers are better able to exploit their past tense morphology
skills with verbs that describe an event with a specified endpoint but
are relatively uninfluenced by whether that endpoint was reached
instantaneously (Achievement) or over time (Accomplishment).
80
70
60
50
40
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
30
20
10
0
Achievement
Accomplishment
Post-hoc Finding
Total past tense marking accuracies on non-alveolar bare stem verbs
were similar across Lexical Aspect categories differing on
the durative property. (n = 26 children)
Achievement Verbs: 74.29% (78/105)
Accomplishment Verbs: 77.42% (96/124)
Data collection was supported by NIH/NIDCD (PI: Schuele). Completion of this study and
preparation of this poster were supported by a Preparation of Leadership Personnel grant
(H325D080075; PI: Schuele), U.S. Department of Education.
LIST OF CITED REFERENCES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/LANGUAGELAB Poster Presented at the Annual ASHA ConvenHon, San Diego, CA November 2011