Introduction
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Introduction
“You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your
house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you
rise”
(Deuteronomy 11:19, English Standard Version)
This biblical quotation eloquently illustrates the huge responsibility of parents
to schedule time for conversing with children in lieu of restricting their talk to
correction or direction. Though it is a challenge in this digital era, one of the
important blessings of teaching or conversing with children is language
development. Conversation enhances the child’s ability to formulate sentences
besides facilitating vocabulary growth. A child’s syntax (Catania, 1998; Freidin,
1992), progresses throughout the first six years of life from single word utterances to
multiple word utterances which are, at first, telegraphic, and then increase in
complexity so that they are more similar to adult speech. Further, language
development entrenches the foundation for the child’s academic learning too.
Bloom and Lahey (1978) described language as a code to represent ideas or
information through a conventional system of arbitrary signals for communication.
Words or sentences are formed based on a system of rules. Language comprises of
three major components: ‘content’ that encompasses meaning or semantics, ‘form’
that connects sounds or symbols in a particular order and ‘use’ or pragmatics that
involves the contextually-appropriate use of language. The language component
‘form’ includes phonology, morphology and syntax. Phonology is the study of the
organization of sounds of a particular language while phonetics is the branch of
linguistics that deals with the physical production and perception of speech sounds.
Phonemes are sounds used in a given language to encode meaning.
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Introduction
A set of rules that explain sentence construction constitute syntax of a
particular language. It can be described as the sequence of syntactic categories
(subject-verb-object e.g., The boy–caught–the ball) or by a series of transformational
rules (sentence = noun phrase + verb phrase e.g., The boy + caught the ball). While
‘syntax’ governs sentence structure of a language, ‘morphology’ is the study of word
structure (Katamba, 1994). Words consist of one or more smaller meaningful units
called morphemes. During early childhood, first vocabulary comprising of nouns,
verbs and adjectives develop. Subsequently, children learn to use grammatical
morphemes such as prepositions, plurals and tenses. By the age of 3 years, children
begin to combine phrases to form clauses and join clauses to make simple sentences
as per the word order of native language. Finally, the child learns to formulate
complex adult-like sentences.
1.2 Morphosyntax in Child Language Disorders
There is increasing evidence in the literature that suggests morphosyntactic
deficits in child language disorders using cross-sectional and longitudinal designs.
Earlier studies primarily focused on morphosyntactic deficits of children with
specific language impairment (SLI). Much of this work has been grounded in
methods and constructs first developed by Brown (1973). Data was collected
through spontaneous speech samples to calculate the mean length of utterance and
Brown’s fourteen morphemes were assessed. Cross-population studies have begun to
appear in literature in recent times which use newer methods such as grammatical
judgment, elicited sentence imitation and experimental tasks. When the investigator
intends to examine specific grammatical structures of a particular language,
clinician-designed grammatical assessment tools are useful. They permit thorough
assessment of the target structures which would be difficult to elicit in spontaneous
speech.
Children with SLI are characterized by omission of grammatical morphemes,
especially finite verb morphemes, and they have low MLU. A similar
morphosyntactic profile has been reported in Down syndrome (DS), however,
children with DS have co-existing deficits in auditory working memory and speech
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Introduction
intelligibility. They omit morphemes such as articles, prepositions, pronouns,
conjunctions, plurals and possessives. They may not be as cooperative as children
with SLI, for morphosyntactic assessment. Several studies have investigated
morphosyntax in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Verbal children
with ASD exhibit difficulty in learning multiword combinations in the
developmental period. They tend to use telegraphic speech, and fail to learn the
word-order rules and the productive use of grammatical morphemes. On the
contrary, children with semantic pragmatic disorder (SPD) have impaired
conversational or narrative skills and impaired social use of language although their
syntax is intact. There is dearth of research on cross-population comparison of
grammatical morphology.
1.3 From Clinical Practice to Research
While treating these children with language impairment who have overlapping
morphosyntactic deficits, some common observations could be derived. They find it
difficult to move from single word to multiword utterances due to word-order
confusions and omission of bound morphemes or inflections. In morphological
intervention, any clinical practitioner would benefit from seeking answers to the
following questions: 1.Which specific morpheme to teach? 2. In which order should
these morphemes be taught? and 3. What test could be devised to monitor progress
during or after morphological intervention to facilitate transition of children from
early word to multiword utterances?
These clinical queries led to the present investigation on expressive
grammatical morphology in children with and without language impairment.
Majority of the Indian studies on morphology has been done in agglutinative
dravidian languages which have words with multiple suffixes. Most of the early
research focused on examining the emergence of grammatical morphology in
typically developing children (Sreedevi, 1976; Subramanyaiah, 1978; Prema, 1979;
Ranganatha, 1982) in Kannada language. Roopa (1979) made a descriptive study on
productive syntax in Hindi. Later, Devaki (1987) compared childhood acquisition of
morphological rules of two cognate languages-Tamil and Kannada. Another
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Introduction
comparative study (Shyamala & Basanti, 2002) was on language development in
two groups of children who were either native speakers of Kannada or Hindi.
Recently, Thomas, Rachel, Paul and Kumaraswamy (2013) investigated the
acquisition of plurals in Malayalam speaking children. However, studies
investigating the sequence of emergence of major grammatical morphemes of
Malayalam are limited.
Subsequent research on emergence of expressive grammatical morphology in
clinical population has also been reported in the Indian context. Prasitha and Prema
(2008) conducted a study on development of morphosyntax, namely, conjunction,
negation, case marker, tense, person-noun-gender (PNG) marker in five Kannada
speaking children with SLI as compared to the controls. They used picture
description task, mother-child interaction and structured play for language sampling.
They found that linguistic markers and forms were achieved by 5 years; along with
noun phrase conjunction and dative case marker. Added to that, case markers
developed earlier than negation and conjunctions while PNG markers emerged prior
to case markers. Further, children with SLI had omission of case markers and tenses.
More recently, Shafna and Shyamala (2011) explored the grammatical abilities
of 15 children with ASD as compared to age-matched controls. Three age groups,
namely, 4-5, 5-6 and 6-7 years were examined for morphosyntax using Malayalam
Language Test (Rukmini, 1994) and picture description task. They found that ASD
group obtained significantly lower scores than the typically developing controls
across all age groups. Tharakam and Shyamala (2011) had conducted a similar study
on agrammatism in children with mental retardation. However, there is paucity of
cross-population research on expressive grammatical morphology in the Indian
context. Hence, the present study was undertaken to investigate the emergence of
expressive grammatical morphology across clinical groups, i.e., ASD, SLI, DS and
SPD.
The Test for Examining Expressive Morphology (TEEM) (Shipley, Stone, &
Sue, 1983) is a commonly used standardized test to examine the emergence of
expressive grammatical morphology in 3 to 7 year old children. Language sample is
elicited with a sentence-completion task on presenting the picture stimulus. The
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Introduction
TEEM comprises 54 items that assess six major morphemes of English: present
progressives, plurals, possessives, past tenses, third-person singulars, and derived
adjectives. However, there are certain limitations in adapting tests standardized in
English language to Indian languages, as described below.
Unlike English, Indian languages have flexible word ordering (Mohanty &
Mohanty, 1981). Case markers are not very common in modern English, but are
salient in ancient English and Indo-European languages, such as Latin and Sanskrit.
In Dravidian languages, case markers and object inflections are much more reliable
indicators of relationship between words compared to word order cues (Berry,
Mishra & Tripathi, 2003). Certain grammatical morphemes such as conjunctions
exist as ‘free morpheme’ in English, whereas it exists as ‘bound morpheme’ in
Malayalam. For example, ‘position’ can be indicated by prepositions such as ‘on’ or
‘in’ (free morpheme) in English, while it can be either locative case marker /il/
(bound morpheme) or preposition /uɭil/ (free morpheme) in Malayalam. Malayalam
is an agglutinative language while English is not. These differences cause limitation
in applying such tests for assessing expressive morphology in native Malayalam
speakers.
Some of the standardized language tests in the Indian context that help in
evaluating morphosyntax include Screening Test for Acquisition of Syntax in
Kannada (Vijayalakshmi, 1981), Screening Test for Acquisition of Syntax in Hindi
(Basavaraj, 2009), and Comprehensive Language Assessment Tool for Children
(Navitha & Shyamala, 2009). Another commonly used assessment tool has been the
Linguistic Profile Test (Suchitra & Karanth, 1990) which was later adapted into
many Indian languages, for instance, the Malayalam Language Test (Rukmini,
1994). It has the following subtests: morphophonemic structure, plural, tenses, PNG
markers, case markers, conditional clauses, transitives, intransitives, causatives;
sentence types, conjunctives and quotatives, comparatives and participle
constructions. Thus, it focuses on several aspects of morphosyntax in both receptive
and expressive domains. The investigator found no suitable tools in Malayalam, for
detailed evaluation of productive use of specific grammatical bound morphemes,
which can serve to establish the baseline skills, enable selection of specific goals and
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Introduction
whose test stimuli could plausibly be utilised for morphological intervention too.
Consequently, in the present investigation, an attempt has been made to develop a
test in Malayalam to investigate emergence of six high frequency expressive
grammatical morphemes. To facilitate in-depth investigation of these morphemes in
children with and without language impairment, a sentence imitation task was
chosen. The present study would provide insight regarding the sequence of
emergence of grammatical morphemes in Malayalam speaking typically developing
children. This information would prove to be beneficial in setting specific goals for
successful morphological intervention to help the language impaired child to
progress from single word to sentence level utterances.
1.4 Aim of the study
The present study aimed to investigate the emergence of expressive
grammatical morphology (Plurals, Case Markers and Conjunction) in Malayalam
speaking children with and without language impairment.
1.5 Objectives of the study
The major objectives of the study were,
1. To develop and standardize a tool (Test for Examining Expressive
Morphology in Malayalam, TEEMM) to study the emergence of expressive
grammatical inflectional bound morphemes of Malayalam: plurals /kal/, case
markers- accusative /e/, locative /il/, genitive /ute/, dative /kkә/ or /nә/, and
conjunction /um/.
2. To investigate the emergence of these target morphemes in Malayalamspeaking typically developing children aged between 3 to 6 years.
3. An exploratory study of expressive morphological deficits in a small sample
of children with autism spectrum disorders, specific language impairment,
Down syndrome and semantic pragmatic disorder, was also considered.
4. To compare the expressive grammatical morphology of Malayalam-speaking
children with and without language impairment.
5. To look for pedagogical implications, useful in devising therapeutic measures
for improving expressive grammatical morphology in Malayalam speaking
children with language impairment.
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