engleski

Early development of nominal and verbal morphology from a typological perspective - strongly inflecting languages: Russian, Croatian, and Greek

The analysis of Croatian data based on the child corpus of one Croatian child, Antonija, has provided sufficient evidence for obtaining answers to questions raised at the beginning of this paper. Morphological complexity proves to be a trigger for early acquisition. The first oppositions appear already at age 1 ; 6 while the first grammatical markers appear in the one-word stage. Such course of morphological development differs significantly form the data in other and/or less morphologically complex languages. Child behaves from the very beginning as an 'efficient' learner being confronted with morphological richness in target language. The child balances between acquiring vocabulary and morphology. After acquiring the critical vocabulary mass, the seesaw flips to the other side and the acquisition of morphology follows in a high speed.

language acquisition ; nominal morphology ; verbal morphology

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