1. PAPER OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
MORPHEME ACQUISITION and
LATER SPEECH STAGES
By GROUP I:
RAHMANELI (2312.003)
ATIKAH APRILLIANI (2312.005)
SWETY NOVITA SARI (2312.007)
MISDA ROSITA (231.009)
HAMID KASMAN (2312.031)

2. Morpheme Acquisition
• Morpheme acquisition is how children start and add function words and
also change the intonation into their own speech.
• There are 13 morphemes acquisition have been found by Robert Brown in
children:
1. Progressive:continuing action; by using ‘V+ing’
2. Preposition:location; by using ‘in or on’
3. Plural (more than 1 object); by using /s/,/z/, or /iz/ in the final sound
of word
4. Past Irregular:Past time; such as came, went, fell
5. Possesive,Possession; by using /s/,/z/, or /iz/
6. Copula ‘be’ Uncontractible:connector with tense; by using ‘is ’
7. Article:one, previous reference; by using ‘a’, ‘an’, or ‘the’
8. Past Regular:past time; by /t/, /d/, or /id/ in the final sound of regular
verbs
9. Third Person Regular:3rd person present singular; /s/, /z/, or /iz/
10. Third Person Irregular; by using does,has
11. Auxiliary ‘be’ Uncontractible:tense carrier; ex: ‘Is Mary happy?’
12. Copula ‘be’ Contractible:connector with tense; ex: ‘Mary’s hungry’
13. Auxiliary ‘be’ Contractible:tense carrier; ex: ‘Mary’s playing’

3. Why this order of acquisition?
• If adult more highly used morphemes in speech,
the child will learn faster, but Brown did not find
relationship.
• Plural is learned early because it only requires the
idea of number
• The copula ‘be’ is more complex because the
child needs to apply both number and tense to
select which form of the copula to use
• Dulay, Burt, and Krashen suggest that there is a
sort of predetermined order in the child’s mind
which is governed by as yet unknown
mechanisms, and that the morphemes appear in
the order they do because of such mechanisms.

4. The explanation of the order acquisition
Variable 1: ease of observability of referent
The more easily a child can see or hear
experience the referent (object, situation or
events), the more likely are such referents to be
stored in memories.
Variable 2: meaningfulness of referent
Referents which are interest to the children then
they desire to communicate will be learned faster
than those which lack such interest (naturally and
more highly meaningful referents)
Variable 3: distinctiveness of sound in referent
The greater the sound distinction involved, the
easier it will be for a morpheme signal to be
learned.

5. Ratting the morphemes in these variables
• Ratting of High (H), Medium (M), or Low (L)
in these variables is depending on degree to
which we estimate the morpheme to manifest
that variable
• The more Highs for a morpheme, the faster the
learning, and also the more Lows, the slower
the learning
• More observable and carry more meaning
referents will be more quickly learned than
which are not.

6. Explaining the order of some morphemes
1. Why are Progressive and Prepositions learned earliest?
- The Progressive morpheme relates to the action of objects, and
the events stimulate child’s interest
- The Prepositions are signal the locations of object
2. Why are Plural and Possesive learned before Third Person?
- The Plural and Possessive are much more involved with
observable and meaningful referents for the child than the Third
Person Singular
- These morphemes are easily noticeable and involve referents which
are highly meaningful to the child
- The Third Person morpheme involves the noting of a singular Third
Person referent, a much less obvious kind of object, being defined
by a more abstract relationship
3. Why is Past Irregular learned before Past Regular?
- The irregular verbs more noticeable than the regular verbs
- The sound suffixes of the regular past forms are hard to hear
- The Irregular verbs are the most common ones and more
frequently in everyday life than regular verbs.

7. Later Speech Stages
1. Negation formation
- Period 1 by using ‘No’ or ‘Not’: ‘No money’,
‘Not a teddy bear’, ‘No singing song’.
- Period 2 by using ‘do’ or ‘can’: ‘I don’t want
it’, ‘I can’t dance’.
- Period 3:
- ‘do’ is not added when there is a modal,
ex: ‘Donna won’t let go’
- when ‘do’ must be inserted, ex: ‘I didn’t
did it’; and when ‘do’ is not inserted, ex:
‘I am not a doctor’
- The child began to use negative (Period 1) as
early as 1 year 6 months, and Period 3 by 2
years.

8. 2. Question formations
- The children take the easy way and begin the
production of questions by using intonation
1). Use of rising intonation+single word
or phrases, ex: ‘Sit chair?’
2). Use of WH questions, ex: ‘Why you
smiling?’
3). Tag question (1): no negation on the tag, ex:
‘He’ll catch cold,will he?’
and tag question (2), ex: ‘We had fun,
didn’t we?’
4). ‘What’ and ‘Where’ described from
concrete to abstract (or used as unanalysed
chunks), and ‘why’, ‘how’, and ‘when’
described from concrete to abstract.
- The children began to use question by 4 years old

9. 3. Passive formation
- Child must know in comprehending the
meaning of the passive and then producing
it
- Children apply the first noun as being the
agent of the utterance, at an early stage
- Children will apply both semantic syntactic
cues for comprehension of passives, at a
later stage
- Children’s comprehension of the passive
began around 4 years old.

10. 4. Other problems
1). Structures with two or more verbs
- WH-clauses appear with abstract adverbials
(‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘how’) emerge before
the nouns that they replace. Ex: ‘Can I do it
when we get home?’
- WH-adverb used instead of location
‘where’ is less complex than using
‘the place’
- It was began around the age of 2 or 3
years and will be completed until the
age of 11.
2). Verb problems
- The children ought to be interpreting the
meaning
- Children cannot distinguish between the
sentence
- It will be begun around 10 or 11 years.

11. Conclusion
• Morpheme acquisition is how children start and add
function words and also change the intonation into their
own speech.
• There are 13 morphemes acquisition have been found by
Robert Brown in children
• The more observeable an objects, a situation, or an events it
makes the child will be faster to learn and express what has
they acquired
• Negation formation is how the children express their
negative feelings into their own speech
• Question formation is how the children express their
question by using intonation
• Child must know in comprehending the meaning of the
passive and then producing it
• How children solve their other problems in structure with
two or more verbs by using WH-clauses or WH-adverb, and
also verb problems by using interpreting the meaning into
their own language.