SLP102-4: Wong - Quiz 2 3/24/21 - Morphology
Morphology Study Guide - Mean length of utterance (MLU)
Mean length of utterance "average number of morphemes over 100 utterances"; the average number of morphemes a child produces; measures language development and the stages of development (more reliable than chronological age)
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist
Mainly touted and influenced by work of Noam Chomsky, MIT; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1957)
Morphology and MLU - MLU
Mean length of utterance "average number of morphemes over 100 utterances"; measures language development and the stages of development (more reliable than chronological age)
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Children's innate cognitive skills consist of two factors
intention reading and pattern finding.
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Social skills
involve a child's desire to interact with others.
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Pattern finding
sensitivity to regularities in the language that they hear in the environment ---like the regular use of what to ask a question
Morphology Study Guide - Bound morpheme
serves a grammatical purpose and can be attached to a free morpheme
Morphology Study Guide - Morphophonology, p. 11 & 90
the study of interaction between a language's morphemes and its phonological processes, focusing on the sound changes that occur when morphemes combine to form words
Levey Ch. 2 - Cognitive - Schemas
they are psychological structures that allow children to understand the meaning of things in their environment.
Levey Ch. 2 - Cognitive - An example of a schema
A child learns the word dog to describe the animal that they see. Young children may apply this schema to identify other entities with perceptual similarities to a dog.It is common to hear young children identify cows and cats as doggy. Can you explain why these animals are called doggy?
Morphology Study Guide - Free morpheme
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word. A free morpheme is also termed an Unbound morpheme or a free-standing morpheme
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is the caretaker's speech? What is joint attention and joint talk (Also see Levey, p. 76 and Table 4-3, p. 76.)
A speech style often used by adults and older children when talking to infants or young children, characterized by shortened sentences, simplified grammar, restricted vocabulary, slow speech with many repetitions, diminutive and reduplicative words, such as doggy and choo-choo, raised pitch and exaggerated pitch variation, and many utterances ending in questions with a rising tone (some more?, go walkies?). Also called child-directed speech, motherese (misleadingly, because it is not restricted to mothers) and baby talk (ambiguously, because it is used by adults).
Morphology Study Guide - Affixes
A word element, such as a prefix or suffix, that can only occur attached to a base, stem, or root
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Notion of Competence
All native speakers are assumed to know the linguistic rules of their language without being overtly taught. Innatists were not interested in what speakers DO when they use language; Performance is flawed. People produce slips of the tongue, errors, and mistakes when they speak; Performance does not give us insights into the competence or rules of the language that the speaker possesses.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Generative Grammar
An adequate grammar must be generative or creative to account for the variety of sentences that speakers can produce and understand. A true grammar should describe the speaker's knowledge of all permissible utterances (competence) and not just the utterances typically produced (performance).
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction - Learning takes place through exposure to the use of language as adults or older peers label, describe, or discuss
An individual's state of mind: feelings, beliefs, and knowledge; Entities: people, things, and animals; Actions: swimming, drinking, and cutting; Events: parties, football games, and parades
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What are principles and parameters in the innatist perspective (pp. 34-35)?
An innate language acquisition device allows children to establish grammatical information from spoken language. The LAD consists of innate language principles that are common to all languages and parameters that can be set for the grammatical rules for a particular language. Through hypothesis testing, children use information from spoken language in the child's environment. Thus, parameter setting is the process that allows children to produce the correct grammatical forms for different languages
Morphology and MLU - Infant Language Acquisition
Babbling begins @ 6 mos. (bababa, dadada); babies: phonological structure first (e.g., intonation, stress); See Levey on delayed babbling as sign of potential language disorder
Morphology and MLU - Infant -Toddler Language Acquisition
Babbling; One-word stage (e.g., allgone); Two-word (word combining), e.g., Mommy cry; Reception precedes production; Child may understand, but not be able to produce the utterance(s) that they hear correctly; Silent Period; Grammatical classes - Nouns, Verbs, Content words precede function words, Actions & locations first
Three perspectives on Language Acquisition
Behaviorist, Innatist/Nativist/Cognitive, and Interactionist.
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is the connection between theories of language development and practice?
Behaviorists believe that language behaviors are learned by imitation, reinforcement, and copying adult language behaviors. They consider language to be determined not by experimentation or self-discovery, but by selective reinforcements from speech and language models, usually parents or other family members. Behaviorists focus on external forces that shape a child's language and see the child as a reactor to these forces. Two other concepts that are important for understanding the behaviorist ideas of speech and language development are imitation and practice. A young child will try to imitate sounds and words he hears his parents say the best he can. When a child says a word that sounds close to what the parents say, they accept and reinforce it. In other words, they begin shaping the word until the child can eventually say the word as well as the parents do. The nativistic theory is a biologically-based theory which states that language is innate, physiologically determined, and genetically transmitted. This means that a newborn baby is "pre-wired" for language acquisition and a linguistic mechanism is activated by exposure to language. This theory believes that language is universal and unique to only humans and that unless there are severe mental or physical limitations, or severe isolation and deprivation, humans will acquire language. The nativistic theory argues that caregivers do not teach children the understanding of language and do not usually provide feedback about the correctness of their utterances. The main theorist associated with the nativist theory is Noam Chomsky. He came up with the idea of the language acquisition device (LAD). The LAD is a language organ that is hard-wired into our brains at birth. Once a child is exposed to language, the LAD activates. The semantic-cognitive theory is a perspective of language development that emphasizes the interrelationship between language learning and cognition; that is, the meanings conveyed by a child's productions. Children demonstrate certain cognitive abilities as a corresponding language behavior emerges. The semantic meaning that a person wants to communicate determines the words and word order (syntactic form) the person uses. For example, children know what they want to communicate (cognition) but do not always use the correct semantics or grammar. Also, children may not know the correct use of a word or understand that a word can have more than one meaning. The social-pragmatic theory considers communication as the basic function of language. This perspective is first seen in infant-caregiver interactions in which the caregiver responds to an infant's sounds and gestures. The prerequisites for the social-pragmatic theory are: 1.) The infant must have a caregiver in close proximity to see, hear, or touch 2.) The caregiver must provide the infant with basic physical needs such as food, warmth, and exploring the environment 3.) The infant must develop an attachment to the caregiver 4.) The infant and caregiver must be able to attend to the same objects or actions simultaneously 5.) The infant and caregiver engage in turn-taking in both verbal and nonverbal behaviors.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Scaffolding of Language Learning
Caretaker's speech (motherese, parentese, joint talk) may be crucial in language learning
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Language as a Social Phenomenon
Child is viewed as a social being; learning reflects the 'social self' (Lindfors, 1991); L1 & L2 interface? "One learns how to do conversation and out of this syntactic structures develop." (Hatch 1975, 1978)
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - Summary
Children are born with an innate mechanism that provides the ability to develop syntax. This is a language learning device (LAD). The environment is the source of switching the parameters for language learning, with the language spoken in the child's environment providing the parameter (structure) for the correct syntactic form.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Children's Language Acquisition
Children discover or 'creatively construct' the rules and regularities of their native language. Children are exposed to surface representations of language. But they abstract deep, underlying structures of the language. Children are only exposed to a finite set of rules about the language. Children have ability to produce and comprehend an infinite number of novel sentences.
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction Theory
Children's language acquisition emerges through social interaction and experience with language used in the external environment. Children possess the desire to interact with others in the environment. Within this interaction, adults and children with greater knowledge provide guidance to children's language acquisition and development.
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters Theory
Chomsky argued that language acquisition is based on an innate (inborn) structure in the human brain: the Language Acquisition Device (LAD).
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - See Chomsky on LAD and innatist perspective (pp. 34-35)
Chomsky argues that language acquisition is based on an innate structure in the human brain, with the brain pre-wired to provide children with the capacity to learn language. The term pre-wired means that human infants are born with a brain equipped with the ability to learn language. This innate brain mechanism is term the LAD
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist Perspective
Compromise between behaviorist & innatist approaches;
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Bilingualism
Earlier Thinking = Linguistic Deficit Theory, Later Thinking = (Early) bilingualism is advantageous in language learning; language learning is better/faster down the road
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Summary
Emergentism Proposes that language learning is based on the "emergent" effect of cognitive, social, pragmatic, and attentional factors. Pattern-finding allows children to find similarities in the way words, phrases, and sentences are used and combined across different utterances and different situations.
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - The Difference between English and Japanese
English is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language while Japanese is a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language, with word order differences shown below (Smith, 2012). John put the book on the table; John-ga hon-wo teiburu-ni okimashi.ta [John book table put]
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is generative grammar, and which perspective of language acquisition is it associated with?
Generative grammar is a type of grammar which describes a language in terms of a set of logical rules formulated so as to be capable of generating the infinite number of possible sentences of that language and providing them with the correct structural description.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - Problems with Behaviorist Perspective
If language learning is due to general learning potential, how do we account for uniformity of language acquisition throughout human species? How come all children acquire language in very much the same way, regardless of their intelligence level? What's wrong with saying that children just imitate sentences they hear in their environment? Imitation doesn't explain why children produce incorrect utterances; Examples:"Whobody parked the motorcycle?" "She comed to my house."
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Interactionist Perspective
Importance of social environment; Importance of social interaction
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - Behaviorist Perspective
Influence of B.F. Skinner, psychologist; Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior
Levey Ch. 2 - Cognitive - Summary
Innate cognitive abilities allow children to learn language, gained through experience within the external environment. Certain cognitive skills support language development, such as the ability to form schemas and object permanence. These schemas allow children to learn the language used in the environment to label things, actions, and events.
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What in 'input' in language development?
Input refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use. This can be from various sources, including the teacher, other learners, and the environment around the learners. Input can be compared to intake, which is input then taken in and internalized by the learner so it can be applied. Acquisition theories emphasise the importance of comprehensible input, which is language just beyond the competence of the learner, and provides the ideal conditions for acquisition to happen.
Levey Ch. 2 - Cognitive Theory
It is based on the idea that language acquisition and cognition are connected (Piaget, 1954).
Levey Ch. 2 - Cognitive - Object permanence
It is the ability to produce words for entities or events that are out of sight. Children achieve this cognitive skill around 10 months of age. They then understand that people and things exist--- even when they cannot be seen or heard.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist
L1 children learn language 'habits'
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - LAD - Hardwired for language learning...
Language Learning as Hardwiring - (Contrast with behaviorism's language learning as habit formation); LAD (Language Acquisition Device); Hardwired for language learning as an innate ability
Levey Ch. 2 - The Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Language acquisition and learning emerges from an innate brain mechanism termed the language acquisition device (LAD); The LAD is a part of the human mind that provides children with the ability to grasp the basic structure of a language.
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction Theory - Summary
Language develops through social interaction. Within the context of social interaction, children gain information from adults and children with greater knowledge. Scaffolds play a role in language development, with more experienced speakers providing correct models of the child's intended goal.
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism
Language is acquired through the "emergent" effect of these factors: Cognition, Social interaction, Pragmatic skills, and Attention skills
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is lateralization and its influence on language acquisition?
Language lateralization refers to the phenomenon in which one hemisphere (typically the left) shows greater involvement in language functions than the other. Lateralization is the differing functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Research over the years has shown that damage to one hemisphere or the other can produce different problems and knowing this can help predict behavior.
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is the distinction between linguistic competence vs. linguistic performance as these concepts are understood by linguists?
Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which is the way a language system is used in communication. Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes 'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and 'performance' as the production of actual utterances. In short, competence involves "knowing" the language and performance involves "doing" something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing performance. Noting the distinction between competence and performance is useful primarily because it allows those studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and not knowing something about the language.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - Examples of language 'habits' of Chinese
No conjugation of verbs; no marking of time & aspect as done in English 'habits'; Use of adverbial expressions to signal time distinctions - Today I study, Tomorrow I study. Yesterday I study, Next year I study; it does not overtly mark singular or plural nouns. Examples: *Do you have pen(s)?; I have two child. ["two" is the clue]; Chinese does not overtly distinguish between 'he' and 'she' in spoken form (but does distinguish in written form/characters). Context is used to disambiguate in spoken language. Ta (he or she) hao. ["She or he is good."]
Levey Ch. 2 - Cognitive - Play with language learning
Piaget also emphasized the role of play as essential in learning language. Play involves children imitating the activities and experiences perceived in their environment. Common activities found in early play consist of shopping, cooking, going to school, or going to the doctor. Children learn the language to label these experiences from adults (e.g., paying at checkout, put your coat in the cubby, and open your mouth and say "ahh").
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - What role does environment play in innatist perspective?
Plays no role or minor role (does not recognize the need for experience with the language environment); Language 'input' acts only as a trigger (Chomsky's 'Theory of Parameter Setting')
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - Stimulus - Response Theory
Positive & negative reinforcement; Child L1 learning is shaped by environmental conditions (stimuli) and verbal behaviors (responses)
Levey Ch. 2 - The theories of language acquisition presented in this chapter can be placed into four main categories
Principles and parameters theory, Social-interaction theory, Cognitive theory, and Emergentism.
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - Explanation of Language Development
Principles are innate (inborn) language-general rules; General principles apply to all languages; Such as the principle that a sentence must contain a subject (e.g., boy, car, bee) and a verb (e.g., run, walk, drink)
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - How do children learn to speak?
Reinforcement, Imitation, Successive approximations to mature performance; based on stimuli child is provided from the environment
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Interactionist Approach in Pedagogy
SCT (Vygotsky); Importance of (emphasis on) social interaction; Instructional Conversations (IC); Language Experience Approach (LEA) in teaching reading and writing; Communicative language teaching (CLT); Conversation Analysis (CA) & Second Language Pedagogy (Wong & Waring, 2021)
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - Behaviorist manifestation - Audio-lingual method (ALM)
Second/foreign language teaching & Audiolingual Method (ALM) [considered as 'progress' after grammar-translation method]
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction
Social interaction with more experienced language users is the vehicle that facilitates the development of language skills.
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is the LAD?
Stands for Language Acquisition Device; It is the concept that infants have an instinctive mental capacity which enables them to acquire and produce language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or innate facility for acquiring language. It is believed that without this innate knowledge of grammar, children would be unable to learn language as quickly as they do; Language acquisition and learning emerges from an innate brain mechanism termed the language acquisition device (LAD); The LAD is a part of the human mind that provides children with the ability to grasp the basic structure of a language.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Language as Social Phenomenon
Structure of language may have arisen due to social communicative needs and functions. Relationships between language, social organization, and social structure needs to be examined (more).
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Lennenberg's (1967) Critical Age Theory
Supported Chomsky's theory & notion of LAD; Children learn language best before onset of puberty
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - Joint talk
Talking to babies as they explore objects in their environment facilitates joint attention.
Morphology Study Guide - Morphosyntactic development
The addition of morphemes that expand a child's syntax or sentence length
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is the (social) interactionist perspective on language acquisition?
The interactionist approach (sociocultural theory) combines ideas from sociology and biology to explain how language is developed. According to this theory, children learn language out of a desire to communicate with the world around them. Language emerges from, and is dependent upon, social interaction. Interactionist theory asserts that language acquisition has both biological and social components. Children learn languages more easily than adults, and they are able to grasp grammatical structures without formal education, suggesting an innate or native ability for language (Nativist theory). There are three theories on how humans acquire language: the Nativist, Learning (Behaviorist), and Interactionist theories. According to the Nativist theory, humans have an innate ability to acquire language, and language is most easily acquired during a critical period in early childhood. Learning theory proposes that language is a learned behavior, acquired through operant conditioning, imitation and practice. Interactionist theory asserts that language acquisition has both biological and social components
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - Joint attention
The process by which young children focus their attention on an object or event with a social partner through nonverbal communication. This may include joint gaze and pointing
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What are the three perspectives on language acquisition? What can you say about them? Who do we associate (e.g., an icon) with each perspective?
The three perspectives on language acquisition are spoken words, written symbols or sign language. Symbols label things, actions, thoughts, and activities.
Levey Ch. 2 There are common factors that appear in these theories
The use of scaffolds to provide the correct language target, Play as a vehicle to develop language skills, Focus on children's interests to attain engagement, and Interactive tasks that include frequent and abundant input.
Levey Ch. 2 - There is a connection between language development theories and practice
Theories offer concepts or ideas of the factors that may support language acquisition and development; Theories offer methods that can be used to support children's language development in a clinical setting. Theories provide evidence for useful approaches to intervention.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Notion of Performance
This is all we have as far as examination of one's use/ability in language learning. What we know about someone's language competence can only be measured by what we see them doing with the language, i.e., what they say and understand. Linked with the importance of examining language USE; How does a (child) speaker actually use the language under context X, Y, etc.?
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is universal grammar, and how might they differ across languages? Give some examples
Universal grammar consists of a set of unconscious constraints that let us decide whether a sentence is correctly formed. This mental grammar is not necessarily the same for all languages. The theory of universal grammar proposes that if human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of extreme sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with certain properties (e.g., distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from content words).
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Universal Grammar (UG)
Universal, linguistic rules or core properties that cut across all languages; All languages denote tense/time; English uses morphological marking on verbs; Chinese uses adverbial expressions; Examples: 1. English uses word order in a sentence to indicate subject, direct object and indirect object relations. 2. Japanese uses morphology (word endings/suffixes) to mark subject ('ga'), direct object ('o') and indirect object ('ni')
Morphology Study Guide - Brown's (1973) study [see Infant-Toddler Lang. Dev./PPT]
View PPT
Morphology Study Guide - Levey, Table 1-6
View in Textbook
Morphology Study Guide - Levey, Table 1-7
View in Textbook
Morphology Study Guide - Tables 4-7, 4-8
View in Textbook
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction - The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPG)
Vygotsky (1935) used the term zone of proximal development to describe the distance between: A child's actual developmental level (determined by independent problem solving) -- and his or her level of potential development.
Language Development/Acquisition Study Guide - What is the zone of proximal development (ZPD), and who do we attribute it to?
Vygotsky (1935) used the term zone of proximal development to describe the distance between: A child's actual developmental level (determined by independent problem solving) -- and his or her level of potential development. The zone of proximal development is the distance between what children can do by themselves (retrospective mental development) --and the concepts or skills that they can learn with assistance from adults or children with more advanced language skills (prospective mental development); Social interaction with more experienced language users is the vehicle that facilitates the development of language skills.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Socio-cultural theory (SCT)
Vygotsky's theory - language as social tool to private tool, from externalization to internalization of language structures
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist - Examples of language habits
Word Order - SVO (English)"I see them." Plural marking on nouns/s/, /z/, / /, and zero marking in English
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Vygotsky - ZPD
Zone of proximal development
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Cognitive skills involve a theory of mind (TOM)
a child understanding a speaker's thoughts and feelings.
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - Merge
combines two syntactic objects (e.g., noun and verb) to create a new object (noun + verb), as in the following example. Example: Noun = dogs, verb = bark, noun + verb = dogs bark. The process continues with the combination of additional objects to allow children to form longer and more complex utterances.
Morphology Study Guide - Morphology
in what way words and smaller units can be combined to form other words (go+ing=going)
Morphology Study Guide - Derivational morpheme
involve a prefix (un-) or suffix (-ness); they change the meaning of the word (eg: kind becoming unkind); it can also change a verb to a noun; different to inflectional morphemes, as they create/derive a new word, which gets its own entry in the dictionary; they help us to create new words out of base words.
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Attentional factors
involve the ability to focus on a conversation or a task.
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Pragmatic skills
involve the methods of interaction during play and conversation.
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction - The zone of proximal development
is the distance between what children can do by themselves (retrospective mental development) --and the concepts or skills that they can learn with assistance from adults or children with more advanced language skills (prospective mental development)
Theories of Language Acquisition - Innatist/Nativist - Lateralization
language function settles in left hemisphere of brain at puberty (i.e. loss of brain's 'plasticity')
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - Parameters are
language-specific rules that apply to syntactic rules for different languages, such as the word-order rules that differ across languages. For example, subject-verb-object word order (SVO) is a rule for English but not for other languages, which use different word orders to form sentences.
Theories of Language Acquisition - Behaviorist
learning a language is like any other form of behavior. "Language as we ordinarily understand it, in spite of its complexities, is in the beginning a very simple type of behavior. It is really a manipulative habit." (Skinner, 1957)
Morphology Study Guide - Inflectional morphemes (name all of them)
maintain the words grammatical category (ex: noun, verb) and add a grammatical feature to that word (ex: possession or tense): s- is an indicator of a plural form of nouns, s' - marks the possessive form of nouns, s - is attached to verbs in the third person singular, ed - is an indicator of the past tense of verbs, ing - indicates the present participle, en - marks past participle, er - is attached to adjectives to show a comparative form, est - is an indicator of the superlative form of adjectives
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - Parameter setting
provides the language learner with the ability to set the correct parameter (switch) for the language spoken in the environment (e.g., SVO or SOV).
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction - Scaffolds
scaffolds, such as the recasts used above, add new information to a child's utterance, while preserving the child's meaning.
Morphology Study Guide - Index of language development
see textbook??
Theories of Language Acquisition - Interactionist - Many factors influence language development
social, linguistic, maturational, biological, cognitive, etc. These factors are mutually dependent upon, interact with, and modify one another.
Levey Ch. 2 - Principles and Parameters - In this theory
the basic mechanism for further syntactic development is based on an operation termed merge (Berwick & Chomsky, 2016).
Levey Ch. 2 - Innate skills
the human brain is prewired to provide children with the capacity to learn language.
Morphology Study Guide - Morpheme
the minimal, meaningful, and distinctive components of grammar; units of words that determine meaning (free or bound)
Levey Ch. 2 - Social Interaction - Scaffolds
they are used to support children's speech and language development. Examples of scaffolds follow, with a child's production followed by the adult's scaffold. Syntactic scaffold (I going - I am going), Semantic scaffold (Dat doggy? - That's a cow), Phonological scaffold (I want nana - You want a banana).
Morphology Study Guide - Grammatical morphemes
those bits of linguistic sound which mark the grammatical categories of language (Tense, Number, Gender, Aspect), each of which has one or more functions (Past, Present, Future are functions of Tense; Singular and Plural are functions of Number).
Levey Ch. 2 - Emergentism - Intention reading
understanding a speaker's goal and meaning associated with a specific linguistic form.