SALT FAQ - Bound Morphemes
| Q. | Why aren't irregular past tense verbs (e.g. saw) and irregular plurals (e.g. geese) counted as two morphemes? |
| A. | We chose not to count irregulars as two morphemes to simplify the transcription
format. These forms only affect MLU in a slight way and can be accounted for by
other means if there is interest, e.g., count the number of irregulars, double
it and add this to the morpheme count before calculating MLU. Our decision was
made in favor of transcription efficiency as a trade off for absolute accuracy
of the morpheme count. The correlations of MLU with age are not affected and
remain the same for words as well as morphemes using SALT segmentation or C-Unit
segmentation (53% of the variance for conversation and 72% for narrative sample
data in children 3 - 13 years, N=252). |
| Q. | How do you transcribe a word that can function as a verb or a gerund? e.g., "ice skating" |
| A. | In the sentence "I am going ice skating.", ice skating functions as a gerund and is, therefore, not segmented. The same goes for the
sentence "Ice skating is my favorite winter sport." Ice
skating functions as a noun and is not segmented. Also, when the word is
used as an adjective (e.g. "an ice skating rink") it is not segmented. If the
child were to say, "I am ice skating." then you would transcribe it as "I am ice
skate/ing.". |
| Q. | Why is "do/ing" marked with a bound morpheme but "don't" is not? |
| A. | The convention we use states that if the sound of the root does not change as in do and do/ing, then mark the
bound morpheme. If the sound of the root changes as in do and don't, then do not mark the
bound morpheme. This decision was made when working with young children. We felt
that words like don't and won't were learned independent of their root words do and will and should be treated
as different words. Thus don't would count as only one
morpheme and would be counted as a different word than do. This is probably not true for older children. Another
way of looking at this is to consider that don't and won't are irregular negatives and should be treated
the same way we treat irregular past tense (did) and
irregular 3rd-person singular (does) words. Let us
know your thoughts about this. |