Children begin to use functional morphemes in their speech as early as two years old. Functional morphemes encode grammatical meaning within words, but children don't outwardly show their understanding of this. Recently, linguistics have begun to discover that children do recognize functional morphemes when it was previously thought otherwise. She argues that even though children may not actually produce functional morphemes in speech, they do appear to understand their use within sentences. An experiment was conducted by Rushen Shi and Melanie Lepage on children who spoke
Quebec French. They decided to take the
French determiner
des, meaning 'the', and compare it with the words
mes meaning 'my', and
kes (a nonce word). The two verbs used were
preuve 'proof' and
sangle 'saddle'. The verbs then had functors attached to them and appeared in variation with the three noun phrases. Compared to English functors which can be identified through stress, French functors are identified through syllables. This difference made an important distinction between English and French language learners because Shi found that French speaking children learn functors at an earlier age than English speaking children. and
Dutch. So far most languages tend to act similar to English, in that children who are acquiring language learn functional morphemes even though it might not be outwardly apparent. == Neural processing of functional morphemes ==