| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
|
|
meaningful to discuss acquisition in terms of a hierarchy of morphemes in groups than individual morphemes since each group constituted a clear developmental stage and the morphemes within each group were acquired at more or less the same time.
Despite the discovery of some acquisition orders, the morpheme studies have also been subjected to some severe criticism. One obvious problem with this line of research is that the findings are specific to English and have not been replicated with other languages except Spanish. In addition, they can be generalized only to languages that have both bound and free grammatical morphemes with identical meanings. The findings cannot, however, be applied to languages, such as Chinese, that have no morphological component to the grammar. Another problem is the heterogeneity of the morphemes that are involved. As Maratsos (1983) put it, those morphemes do not belong to any coherent structural category. The morphemes selected for study are a mixture of bound and free morphemes, as in the case of 3rd person -s and copula verb be. While the former is a bound morpheme, the latter is a free morpheme.
To remedy the problem of heterogeneity, researchers have shifted their focus to some independent homogeneous linguistic elements or systems. This is evident in studies of relative pronouns, negation, interrogatives, and word order rules.
Felix and Hahn (1985) proposed that various semantic features of pronouns are acquired in the following sequence: emergence of 1st person and he or you to represent all other persons → number is recognized → occurrence of 3rd person → gender is distinguished.
A quite similar sequence was suggested by Lightbown and Spada (1990) for possessive pronouns among French learners of English: Stage I is characterized by the use of definite articles in place of possessive pronouns, as in She reads the book; Stage II is featured with the use of a generalized possessive pronoun for all persons, genders, and numbers, as in She reads your book; Stage III is represented by the use of a single 3rd person possessive pronoun, which is overgeneralized, as in She reads his book; Stage IV is marked by the differentiated use of possessive pronouns