Brown’s Morphological Skills in Typically Developing Bilingual (Malayalam-English) Speaking Children

Abstract

Language is the core of an effective communicative process. The appearance and mastery of the 14 grammatical morphemes in relation to the stages of development was found in the Brown’s research. Morphemes generally convey meanings that could only be implied through the simple word orders and they were mastered at various stages as the child’s language developed. The present study was determined to account which morphological structures were achieved by 5-6 years Malayalam – English speaking children. A total of 30 typically developing children participated in the present study. The speech sample was obtained from conversation and picture description tasks. Results indicate that in picture description task out of 14 grammatical morphemes only six morphemes were present and for general conversation eight morphemes were present in 5-7 Years typically developing Malayalam-English bilingual children. Out of two tasks the children performed well in general conversation. The obtained data is useful for Speech- Language pathologists to understand typical English second language acquisition and how it differs from monolingual English in order to accurately assess and effectively identify potential language disorders as early as possible. Also the results can be used to compare with language disordered group.