Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

I. SINKA, M. GARMAN AND C. SCHELLETTER
Table 2. Sonja, Maija: verb forms by language, complete and intelligible
utterances
Sonja
Maija
English German English Latvian
Types 33 78 37 81
Tokens: All 499 706 211 462
Marked 284 488 115 457
Tensed 200 427 54 385
We may summarise the main patterns in the data as follows:
(1) German/Latvian > English for both verb types and tokens. This is not
obviously attributable to differential language exposure. It may possibly be
linked to the earlier development of FCs including Tense and Agreement in
German/Latvian, and hence to the acquisition of relevant lexical categories;
(2) Sonja > Maija for verb tokens, in the common language English. This
also is not obviously attributable to differential language exposure, and may
reflect the fact that Sonja is older, with consequently greater capacity for
outputting language forms. Such a view is consistent with the observation that
the same dominance is found in the children’s other languages, German >
Latvian.
(3) Latvian > German/English, in proportion of marked, and tensed verb
forms; but German > English, for tensed. This order of precedence reflects the
degree of morphological marking in the three languages.
2.2 Procedure
Using SALT, we first established cuts of the data samples that each consisted of
250 word tokens, starting from the first word, and finishing with the nearest
word to 250 that concluded an utterance. Inflected forms are treated as tokens of
a single type. So are alternative realisations of words such as yes, until and
because. We excluded words in mazes, but included words from incomplete or
partially unintelligible utterances.
We then tagged all main verbs, including those whose inflectional ending
was incorrect (missing or the wrong form) but whose stem form was not in
doubt. We entered all tagged verbs into a spreadsheet for calculation and display
of types and tokens.
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