Guo_Psych447_FinalProject

Running head: ESL MORPHEME ACQUISITION 1
Morpheme Acquisition in English as a Second Language – A Corpus Analysis
Rundi Guo
PSYCH 447 (Fall 2016)
University of Michigan
12/1/2016

MORPHEME ACQUISITION IN L2 ENGLISH 2
Abstract
Early research on morpheme acquisition in English as a second language (ESL) has
posited a “natural” morpheme acquisition order common to all ESL learners, which has been
questioned by more recent findings suggesting an indispensable role of influence from L1. This
corpus analysis investigates whether a common order of acquisition exists among ESL learners
whose first languages are Italian and Punjabi, and whether L1 transfer effect plays a role in the
acquisition of five most studied English morphemes, as well as in the trajectories in the
acquisition. The results did not support the “natural” order hypothesis. In addition, considerable
influence of L1 was observed, with a modified construct of measuring L1 transfer effect.

Introduction
The acquisition of morphemes in English has been one of the central topics in
psycholinguistics research on first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition (SLA).
One of the earliest and probably the most pioneering work on English morpheme acquisition was
Brown’s (1973) longitudinal investigation of three children learning English as their L1, in
which he observed a same fixed order of acquisition across the three children. As such results
were successfully replicated in later studies on L1 English learners, a universal order of
acquisition of English morphemes, at least for L1 learners, became an established view. Dulay
and Burt (1974) set forth a series of morpheme studies on SLA. In their study of Spanish and
Chinese children who were learning English as a second language (ESL), it was concluded that
ESL learners follow a very similar morpheme acquisition as learners of English as their L1.
The existence of such a “natural” pattern in the acquisition of morphemes in ESL learners
remains a dominant view to this day (Murakami & Alexopoulou, 2015). To explain such
observation, Goldschneider & Dekeyser (2001) proposed five contributing factors — perceptual
salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency
— the combination of which can largely predict the acquisition order found in previous ESL
morphological acquisition studies. However, at the same time, growing evidence from ESL
research in the past 40 years seems to reveal more and more complications in the ESL morpheme
acquisition order, bringing the universally “natural” order hypothesis into question. For example,
in A five-year longitudinal study on ten Chinese ESL learners, targeting acquisition of English
morphemes including regular and irregular past tense, third person singular -s, present
progressive -ing, and plural –s, Jia and Fuse (2007) found that while there was a general trend
among all learners, in that -ing was the easiest and regular past tense -ed and third person

singular were the hardest, their more notable observation was the drastically different acquisition
trajectories of different morphemes over the five year span. Specifically, -ing and plural -s
showed accelerated learning initially and then reached plateau, whereas third person -s was
acquired slowly and steadily with no plateau, and regular past tense showed no improvement
over time. According to their explanation, morphemes that are more salient and frequent are
likely acquired earlier and with less difficulties by Chinese ESL learners.
To determine whether ESL learners with different L1 backgrounds acquire English
morphemes in different patterns, Murakami and Alexopoulou (2015) conducted a corpus analysis
on English morpheme acquisition by ESL learners from seven L1 backgrounds using a database
consisting of written exam scripts drawn from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. They found a
significant L1 influence on the accuracy as well as the order of acquisition of six morphemes:
articles, past tense –ed, plural -s, possessive ’s, progressive -ing, and third person -s. Specifically,
morphological features related to “interpretable” as universal semantic concepts – e.g. plurality –
were found to be easier to acquire and less vulnerable to L1 influence than purely grammatical
and language-dependent features that lack semantic significance – e.g. the verb agreement on
third person singular subjects.
The present study aims to investigate morpheme acquisition by ESL learners from two
L1 backgrounds, Punjabi and Italian, neither of which were included in the Murakami and
Alexopoulou (2015) study. Following previous findings, the plural –s and the present progressive
–ing are predicted to be the easiest and least susceptible to L1 influence, the third person singular
–s the hardest and most susceptible to L1 influence, while regular and irregular past tense fall in
between. More specific hypotheses are described below.

The acquisition pattern of -ing might be different between Punjabi and Italian speakers,
because Punjabi does not have a present progressive feature at the morphological level, as
English and Italian do. Since the lack of equivalent feature in L1 was previously found to result
in more difficulty in L2 morpheme acquisition (Murakami & Alexopoulou, 2015), the -ing
morpheme in English might thus be harder for Punjabi speakers than for Italian speakers to learn.
However, in Punjabi, a similar semantic concept, namely, the continuation of a present action, is
expressed at a syntactic/semantic level with a separate following verb, which roughly translates
to “to live” in English (Bhatia, 1993). Since the previous study did not specify whether the lack
of equivalent feature must be on the morphological level for L1 transfer effect to appear, it is
unclear at this point if Punjabi speakers will experience any increased level of difficulty in
learning to express a familiar concept in morphology. Furthermore, although Italian has a present
progressive tense with conjugations at the morphology level, the use of this tense is much less
frequent than its equivalent in English, in that it is mostly reserved for clear instances of
progressive actions, typically for purpose of emphasizing or for responding to questions asked in
the same tense. Since Punjabi does not have this conventional restriction in frequency of use, it
might be equally reasonable to predict that Italian speakers might have a harder time
incorporating this infrequently used morphological feature in their L1 into their speech of
English as L2 at the typical frequency of its occurrence in English. Therefore, the predicted
difference between Punjabi and Italian speakers on the acquisition of the present progressive
morpheme -ing might go either direction.
L1 transfer effect might also be observed when a morphological equivalent does exist in
L2 but is not used on the same word-stem equivalents. The conjugation schemas of words in the
L1 — I.e. the way in which word forms of a same lemma vary — might likely interfere with the

learner’s acquisition of conjugation schemas in L2, if word forms of a same lemma in L2 vary in
different ways from their equivalent in L1. For example, in the conjugation schema in English
verbs (excluding copular, modal, and auxiliary verbs), the word forms corresponding to 1st
person singular and 3rd
person singular in present tense are always different, in that the 3rd
person
forms systematically have an additional inflectional morpheme -s. Italian verbs have a similar
pattern in their conjugation schema — for verbs in the present tense, the 3rd
person singular form
is always different from 1st
person form across verbs belonging to all the declension groups as
well as irregular verbs (Wikipedia). This systematic difference between the 1st
person and the 3rd
person forms in their L1 for Italian speakers might thus facilitate their acquisition of the same
sort of difference in English as their L2.
By contrast, in Punjabi, the inflection on present tense 3rd
person singular verbs are not as
consistent, in that the word form for masculine (but not feminine) 3rd
person singular of a verb is
always identical to that for 1st
person singular (Bhatia, 1993). In other words, whereas English
has word form contrasts between, say, “I eat” and “he/she eats”, Punjabi has conjugations such
as “I eat”, “she eats”, but also “he eat”, (with the rough English “translations” only for
demonstration purposes). This difference in the verb conjugation schema of Punjabi from that of
English might be reflected in Punjabi native speaker’s acquisition pattern of the 3rd
person
singular morpheme -s in English. Specifically, they might have a harder time than do Italian
speakers getting used to the fact that in English, the 3rd
person singular form is different from the
1st
person form.
A similar pattern also holds for the singular/plural inflections in noun schemas in English,
Italian, and Punjabi. Although Punjabi has a systematic distinction between singularity and
plurality in nouns, and although this distinction is reflected in difference in the inflection in most

occasions, nonetheless, the singular and plural forms are identical if the noun is in the ‘direct’
case (Bhatia, 1993). On the other hand, identical forms for singular and plural nouns are
relatively rarer in English, and likewise in Italian.
If such complex L1 transfer effect described above does exist, the 3rd
person singular -s
and the noun plural -s in English would be harder to acquire for L1 Punjabi speakers than for L1
Italian speakers.
To sum up, in the present study, it is hypothesized that, 1) regardless of L1, the rank of
the difficulty in acquisition of the targeted English morphemes (from the most difficult to the
least difficult) is 3rd
person singular -s, followed by regular past tense -ed, followed by irregular
past tense, followed by present progressive –ing and plural -s; 2) the acquisition of present
progressive -ing shows different patterns for Punjabi speakers and Italian speakers, with no
specified prediction on the direction of the difference; 3) the third person singular –s and the
noun plural –s is more difficult for Punjabi speakers than for Italian speakers.
Method
Target Morphemes
The present study targeted five of the most studied English morphological conjugations
and inflections: the regular past tense –ed in verb, irregular past tense verbs, the present
progressive –ing in verbs, the present tense third person singular –s in verbs, and plural –s in
nouns. Another frequently studied morphological inflection – the possessive –‘s in nouns – is not
included, due to the extremely low number of its occurrences in the present database, as well as
potential confounds introduced by the punctuation conventions used in the transcripts. Since the
central focus of this study is on morphemes in the sub-lexical level, lexical morphemes such as
articles are also not included.

Corpus
TalkBank is a system for sharing and studying conversational interactions. The ESF
(European Science Foundation Second Language) Database in the TalkBank system consists of
audio files and transcriptions of oral interviews administered to L2 learners as interviewees by
interviewers who are native speakers of the target language. All the L2 learners in the database
are adult immigrant workers living in Western Europe, whose L2s are acquired spontaneously in
the naturalistic setting of their host countries. The target languages are Dutch, English, French,
German and Swedish. For each target language, two source languages were included. The
current study focused on the sub-corpus in which English is the target language and included
learners from both source languages — Punjabi and Italian — as presented in the corpus.
Two out of the three Punjabi speakers and two out of the four Italian speakers were
selected for analysis. The four learners selected are roughly matched on fluency level, which was
determined by the ratio of unrecognizable words in their speech to all words they produced. The
time span of all the transcripts for all 4 learners is approximately two years, which enables the
investigation on the acquisition trajectory of each of the morphemes over a two-year-phase.
Procedure
To analyze the acquisition trajectory of each of the target morphemes in a standardized
manner for all learners, data for each of the four learners is manually divided into 4 equal time
windows, labeled ’Time 1’, ‘Time 2’, ‘Time 3’, and ‘Time 4’. To examine the potential L1
transfer effect, data from learners with the same L1s are grouped together for related analysis.
The data is analyzed with CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis), a program specifically
designed to analyze spoken language data transcribed in CHAT format (MacWhinney, 2000). A
morphology (MOR) tier is manually inserted to the original data using a CLAN command that

runs on a downloadable English morphology library provided by the CLAN developers. A full
list of CLAN commands used in this study is included in Appendix I.
Measure of Acquisition
The most typically used measure of acquisition in previous morpheme studies was
accuracy of use. Both Dulay and Burt (1973) and Jia and Fuse (2007) calculated the percentage
of correct forms in the contexts in which the morpheme was obligatory (aka. suppliance in
obligatory context, or SOC) as a measure of mastery of the morpheme. However, in the present
study, since information regarding the obligatory context is absent in the database, the SOC
scoring system is unfortunately unavailable. Frequency analysis was used in lieu de SOC.
Specifically, an acquisition score of a morpheme was estimated by calculating the ratio of the
frequency of occurrence of this morpheme produced by the ESL speakers to the frequency of
occurrence of the same morpheme produced by the L1 English interviewers. The logic behind
this scoring system is that if the ESL interviewees were “native-like”, the interviewers and
interviewees should presumably have a comparable number of occurrence of each morpheme,
since they engaged in the same conversation, thus largely shared the context and content of the
conversation. Since the ratios calculated on type frequency and those calculated on token
frequency are always highly correlated, the average values of the two corresponding ratios were
taken to be the final score.
Below is a demonstration of how the acquisition score is calculated in a specific example
-- acquisition of the third person singular –s for Punjabi speakers during Time 2. First, working
directory is set to a folder containing all data files labeled as Time 2 for the two Punjabi speakers;
second, the frequency of occurrence of the third person singular –s morpheme in the ESL
speakers tiers is obtained using the CLAN command freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR

+s“v|*3S” +u, and the output is recorded: 26 and 57 for type and token frequency respectively;
third, the frequency of the same morpheme is obtained in the interviewers’ tiers with the
command freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s“v|*3S” +u, and the output is recorded: 62 and
154 for type and token frequency respectively; fourth, the type frequency ratio and token
frequency ratio are calculated: 26/62=0.42, and 57/154=0.37; and finally, the average of the two
scores – (0.42+0.37)/2=0.39 – was used as the final acquisition score of the third person –s
morpheme for Punjabi speakers during Time 2. The same procedure is used to calculate scores
for all target morphemes for Punjabi and Italian speakers for Time 1 through Time 4 and for
another score collapsing over Time Period to separate out the effect of L1 regardless of time in
acquisition.
To reiterate, with this scoring method, “difficulty” in acquisition in a morpheme is
defined as: abnormally low number of occurrence of this morpheme used by the ESL learners
compared to a baseline frequency obtained from their interlocutors who are native English
speakers. Acquisition is said to be improving if the frequency of use observed in ESL learners
become closer to the baseline frequency. The smaller the discrepancy between the frequency of
the interviewer and that of the interviewee (aka. the larger value of the ratio), the better the
morpheme is learned.
In addition, Previous study also looked at incorrect use resulting from erroneous forms
that are not necessarily incorrect in terms of their context of use, a particularly common error
observed in the acquisition of past tense verbs for English as the L1. More specifically, children
with English as their L1 typically go through a systematic period during which the morpheme -
ed for regular past tense verbs are over-generalized to irregular verbs such as “go”, producing
erroneous forms such as “goed” (Ellis, 2015). To investigate whether this over-regularization

error also occurs for ESL learners, data was analyzed with commands such as freq *.cha +t*SJA
+t*SRA +t%mor +s“?|*ed” +u, in which the string search “?|*ed” searches for all unrecognizable
words with an –ed ending that are produced by the ESL speakers. However, since the pilot
searches yielded no relevant results, which consisted of only non-verblike words such as “leed”
and “mohammed”, no further analysis was conducted on this type of errors. This might suggest
an acquisition pattern differing from L1 acquisition, although not conclusive without larger
dataset and more in-depth analyses.
Results and Discussion
All results of this study is included in Appendix II.
The first hypothesis, regarding the overall difficulty level in acquisition for different
morphemes, was mostly, though not entirely, supported. As shown in Figure 1, the rank in
difficulty of the five English morphemes (starting with the most difficult morpheme) is third
person singular –s and regular past tense, followed by plural noun, followed by irregular past
tense, and followed by present progressive. Consistent with previous findings by Jia and Fuse
(2007) and by Murakami & Alesopoulou (2015), the third person singular –s and the regular past
tense –ed are among the hardest to acquire for ESL learners. Such difficulty could be attributable
to the low level of phonological salience of both morphemes (Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001).
The lack of semantic interpretability in the third person singular –s poses even further challenge
for ESL learners to acquire (Murakami & Alexopoulou, 2015). In addition, the present
progressive –ing was found to be the easiest to acquire, which is likely a result from the presence
of several facilitating properties such as high level of phonological and syntactic saliency as well
as regularity, as propsed by Goldscheider and DeKeyser (2001).

In terms of L1 transfer effect, the most notable finding is that Punjabi speakers scored
much higher on the present progressive –ing than did Italian speakers throughout the entire time.
Punjabi speakers seemed to be unaffected by the lack of a morphological equivalent of the
present progressive tense in their L1 – their innate ability to express the semantic concept of
progressiveness in their L1 seemed to carry over to their acquisition of the corresponding
morphological structure in English, regardless of the fact that they were previously habituated to
express this concept in the syntactic level. Alternatively, the considerably lower acquisition score
of the present progressive –ing for Italian speakers might be due to the low frequency of use of
the morphological equivalent in their L1. Therefore, regarding the definition of L1 transfer effect,
it could be that the frequency of the idea being expressed in L1 is more important than the
existence of a morphological equivalent. Thus, Murakami and Alexopoulou's only measure used
to examine L1 transfer – the existence or lack of an equivalent feature in L1 – might be too
simplistic on its own. In other words, the frequency effect in L1 might likely override the effect
from the existence of a morphological equivalent.
The results also supported the third hypothesis, in that the third person singular –s and the
noun plural –s is more difficult for Punjabi speakers than for Italian speakers, possibly both due
to the difference in conjugation schemas of the equivalent lemma words between Punjabi and
English.
Different morphemes also showed different patterns in the acquisition trajectories for
Punjabi and Italian learners (Figure 6). For example, regular past tense –ed showed no
improvement over time for Punjabi speakers only, whereas Italian speakers improve quickly and
steadily until a plateau effect was reached. Nonetheless, the acquisition trajectories do have some
common trends in all speakers. For example, speakers of both L1 demonstrated a steady

improvement over time for the present progressive –ing, although Punjabi speakers consistently
outperform Italian speakers at any given time. Similarly, Plural -s showed improvement over
time for both speakers but Italian speakers perform better at all time point and they improve at a
much higher rate than do Punjabi speakers. Lastly, speakers of neither L1 showed improvement
for third person singular –s. Further investigation is needed to explain the inconsistency between
such results and findings from previous studies (e.g. Jia & Fuse, 2007).
It is also noteworthy that the difficulty rank order of the five morphemes for Punjabi
speakers is different from that for Italian speakers, as shown in Figure 2 and 3, which seems to
contradict early findings on a “natural” acquisition order for ESL learners regardless of their L1
background.
The present study has several notable limitations. Due to small sample size and the
anecdotal nature of the data, the results might not be representative for all Italian or Punjabi
learners of English. The fact that the present study only examined ESL learners who are native
speakers of these two languages, both of which also happen to belong to the same linguistic
family as English does, also result in low generalizing power to ESL leaners from other language
backgrounds, especially to learners whose L1 is more different from English.
Another limitation of the study is the absence of information regarding the learner’s age
and their experience with English, both prior to the first interview and during the two-year period
when the interviews took place. Since previous studies have found considerable individual
differences, in that factors such as the learner’s age and richness of the learning environment can
all play a role in the acquisition of L2, future investigations on L2 morpheme acquisition might
benefit from the inclusion of such subject-level factors as potential co-variances.

References
Bhatia, T. K. (1993). Punjabi: A conginitive-descriptive grammar. New York;London;:
Routledge.
Brown, R. (1973). A ﬁrst language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Dulay, H. C., & Burt, M. K. (1974). Natural sequences in child second language acquisition.
Language Learning, 24, 37–53.
Ellis, R. (2015). Understanding second language acquisition. (2nd
ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Goldschneider, J. M., & DeKeyser, R. M. (2001). Explaining the “Natural order of L2 morpheme
acquisition” in english: A Meta-analysis of multiple determinants. Language Learning,
51(1), 1-50. doi:10.1111/1467-9922.00147
Italian conjugation. (N.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved November 28, 2016, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_conjugation
Jia, G., & Fuse, A. (2007). Acquisition of English grammatical morphology by native mandarin-
speaking children and adolescents: Age-related differences. Journal of Speech, Language,
and Hearing Research, 50(5), 1280-1299. doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2007/090)
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd Edition.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Murakami, A., & Alexopoulou, T. (2016). L1 influence on the acquisition order of English
grammatical morphemes: A learner corpus study. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 38(3), 365. doi:10.1017/S0272263115000352

Appendix I – CLAN commands
Inserting a MOR tier
MOR *.cha
Past tense all
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR +s"v|*PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s"v|*PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s"v|*PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s"v|*PAST" +u
Past tense regular
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR +s"v|*-PAST" +u
freq *.cha +t*SLA +t*SVI +t%MOR +s"v|*-PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s"v|*-PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s"v|*-PAST" +u
Past tense irregular
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR +s"v|*&PAST" +u
freq *.cha +t*SLA +t*SVI +t%MOR +s"v|*&PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s"v|*&PAST" +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s"v|*&PAST" +u
Past tense overgeneralization:
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%mor +s“?|*ed” +u
freq *.cha +t*SLA +t*SVI +t%mor +s“?|*ed” +u
Present progressive
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR +s"part|*PRESP" +u
freq *.cha +t*SLA +t*SVI +t%MOR +s"part|*PRESP" +u
freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s"part|*PRESP" +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s"part|*PRESP" +u
3rd
person singular
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR +s“v|*3S” +u
freq *.cha +t*SLA +t*SVI +t%MOR +s“v|*3S” +u
freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s“v|*3S” +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s“v|*3S” +u
Noun plural
freq *.cha +t*SJA +t*SRA +t%MOR +s*PL +u

freq *.cha +t*SLA +t*SVI +t%MOR +s*PL +u
freq *.cha -t*SJA -t*SRA +t%MOR +s*PL +u
freq *.cha -t*SLA -t*SVI +t%MOR +s*PL +u

Appendix II – Tables and Figures
Table 1. Full acquisition scores
Punjabi
time 1
Italian
time 1
Punjabi
time 2
Italian
time 2
Punjabi
time 3
Italian
time 3
Punjabi
time 4
Italian
time 4
past tense all 0.13 0.07 0.37 0.36 0.18 0.52 0.41 0.72
past tense regular 0.15 0.04 0.42 0.23 0.05 0.50 0.13 0.41
past tense irregular 0.12 0.09 0.34 0.43 0.24 0.54 0.54 0.91
present progressive 0.56 0.22 0.39 0.20 0.75 0.45 0.87 0.73
3rd person singular 0.08 0.34 0.14 0.49 0.11 0.37 0.08 0.34
plural noun 0.11 0.31 0.20 0.34 0.20 0.56 0.21 0.55

Figure 1. A) Acquisition scores for all morphemes (collapsed over Time Period)
B) Acquisition scores for all morphemes (collapsed over Time Period and L1)
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
past tense all past tense
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun
All Punjabi All Italian
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun

Figure 2. A) Acquisition score for all morphemes for Punjabi speakers
B) Acquisition score for all morphemes for Punjabi speakers (collapsed over Time period)
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
0.80
0.90
1.00
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun
time 1 time 2 time 3 time 4
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun

Figure 3. A) Acquisition score for all morphemes for Italian speakers
B) Acquisition score for all morphemes for Italian speakers (collapsed over Time Period)
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
0.80
0.90
1.00
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0.45
0.5
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun

Figure 4. Acquisition trajectory for all morphemes for Punjabi speakers
Figure 5. Acquisition trajectory for all morphemes for Italian speakers
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
past tense all past tense regular past tense irregular
present progressive 3rd person singular plural noun
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
0.80
0.90
1.00
past tense all past tense regular past tense irregular
present progressive 3rd person singular plural noun

Figure 6. Comparisons between Punjabi and Italian speakers regarding the acquisition
trajectories for each morpheme

0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
Past tense regular
Punjabi Italian
0.00
0.20
0.40
0.60
0.80
1.00
Past tense irregular
Punjabi Italian
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
0.70
0.80
Past tense all
Punjabi Italian
0.00
0.20
0.40
0.60
0.80
1.00
Present progressive
Punjabi Italian
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
3rd person singular
Punjabi Italian
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
Plural noun
Punjabi Italian

Figure 7. Morpheme acquisition scores for all speakers at each Time Period

0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun
Morpheme acquisition at Time 1
0.00
0.10
0.20
0.30
0.40
0.50
0.60
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun


0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
regular
past tense
irregular
present
progressive
3rd person
singular
plural noun

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