The system for combining units of meaning
- Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in a language
- Free morphemes can occur alone
- Bound morphemes cannot
- Order of acquisition of phonemes (Brown 1973)
- Morphemes come in in a consistent order (within a language)
- The order is predicted based on a variety of factors, including the salience and consistency of form-meaning mapping
- Same factors can predict differences between languages (in languages with more salient affixes and consistent form-meaning mappings children learn the morphology earlier)
- The U-shaped curve
- Rote memorization (child stores the forms they hear) – higher accuracy
- Rule acquired and over-applied – lower accuracy
- Rule acquired but children also know there are exceptions – higher accuracy