Morphology is the study of word structure and formation. It involves breaking words down into smaller meaningful units called morphemes. Brown studied the acquisition of 14 English grammatical morphemes in children and found they were acquired gradually over time in a generally consistent order. The first morphemes acquired were prepositions and plurals, while the last were contractible auxiliary verbs. Children's early overregularization errors with morphology like adding "-s" to irregular nouns provide evidence that they are productively applying rules of word formation, not just imitating adult speech.

2. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means
‘shape, form’, and morphology is the
study of form or forms.
 In linguistics morphology refers to
the mental system involved in word
formation or to the branch of
linguistics that deals with words,
their internal structure, and how they
are formed.

3. Morphology is the study of structure
and formation of words.
• Just as sentences can be broken down into
smaller units (words), we can break words
into smaller, meaningful parts.
• The smallest meaningful part of a word is
called a morpheme.

5. Two important changes of
children’s language
 Sentences get longer
 Gradual appearance of a few
inflections and other closed-class
terms.
The process of acquiring the major
grammatical morpheme in English is
gradual and lengthy.

6. The Fourteen Morphemes
 The morpheme group studied by
Brown included:
 Two preposition- (in, on)
 Two articles- ( a, the)
 Noun inflection marking possessive-(‘s)
and plural (-s)
 Verb inflections marking progressive (-ing)
 Third person present tense of regular
verbs (e.g., he walks) or irregular verbs
(e.g., he has)

7. Past tense of regular verbs- ( he
walked) and irregular verbs (e.g., had),
and the main uses of the verb to be: as
auxiliary, both when it can be contracted
(e.g., I am walking or I’m walking) and
when it cannot be contracted (e.g., I was
walking), and as a main verb or copula in
its contractible form (e.g., I am happy or
I’m happy) and its uncontractible form
(e.g., This is it.)

8. Order of Acquisition
The first set of morphemes to be acquired
included:
-The two prepositions
-The plural
-The present progressive inflection
The last morphemes were:
-Contractible formula and auxiliary, which had
not yet reached the acquisition criterion by
Stage V.

9. Average Order of Acquisition of Fourteen Grammatical Morphemes
by Three Children studied by Brown
1. Present progressive Singing
2/3. preposition In the cup
4. Plural Books
5. Irregular past tense Broke
6.Possessive Mommy’s chair
7. Copula uncontractible This is my book
8. Articles A table
9. Regular past tense Walked
10. third-person present tense
regular
He climbs
11. third-person present tense
irregular
John has three cookies
12. Auxiliary uncontractible She was going to school
13. Copula contractible I’m happy; you are special
14. Auxiliary contractible Mommy’s going shopping

10. Productivity of Children’s Morphology
 By age three or four there is clear evidence
that that children are indeed acquiring a
rule-governed system.
 For example, children frequently add the
plural –s to exceptional nouns (mans, foots,
teeths, peoples) or use of regular past
tense –ed on irregular verbs (falled, goed,
broked), even when the correct irregular
form has previously been used.

11. Productivity of Children’s
Morphology
 Overregularization errors like the
examples are an excellent source of
evidence for the productivity and
creativity of child’s morphology;
these are the forms no children would
have heard from an adult.
 This implies that children do not
learn through imitating