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Effects of frequency and morphosyntactic structure on error detection, correction, and repetition in Swedish-speaking children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2018

ANNA EVA HALLIN Open the ORCID record for ANNA EVA HALLIN [Opens in a new window]  and
CHRISTINA REUTERSKIÖLD
ANNA EVA HALLIN*
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet
CHRISTINA REUTERSKIÖLD
Affiliation:
New York University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Anna Eva Hallin, CLINTEC, Division of Speech Language Pathology, Karolinska Institutet, Karolinska University Hospital Huddinge, F67, 141 86 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: annaeva.hallin@ki.se
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Abstract

Grammatical error detection and correction are often used to test explicit language knowledge. This study investigated effects of token frequency and error type in error detection, correction, and repetition, and performance on the three tasks were compared and related to models of metalinguistic awareness and development. Thirty Swedish-speaking 10-year-olds with typical language development participated in the study, which focused on four morphosyntactic errors: the infinitive instead of past tense for regular and irregular verbs, and the omission of the obligatory indefinite article in common and neuter gender noun phrases. Target verbs and nouns were of high or low frequency. Results showed significant effects of verb frequency in all tasks, and effects of noun gender for error detection, but not for correction and repetition. Children detected significantly more past-tense errors than they accurately corrected, but the opposite result was seen for noun phrase errors. The patterns of results both within and across tasks imply that implicit language knowledge affects performance, and that lexical frequency, even of familiar words, needs to be controlled when designing tasks for measuring grammatical knowledge. The particular challenge of the Swedish neuter noun phrase in language development and language processing needs to be further investigated.

Keywords

child normal languagelexicon and word learningmetalinguistic abilitymorphosyntactic processing
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1189 - 1220
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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