Blackwell Reference Online

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Children typically begin to say their first words between twelve and twenty months of age. And they produce systematic morphological modulations of those words within their first year of talking. As they move to more complex expression of their meanings, they add grammatical morphemes – prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, postpositions, and clitics. On nouns, for example, they start to add morphemes to mark such distinctions as gender, number, and case; on verbs, they add markers for aspect, tense, gender, number, and person. Within a particular language, children's mastery of such paradigms may take several years. There are at least three reasons for this: (a) some meaning distinctions appear to be more complex conceptually than others, and so take longer to learn; (b) some paradigms are less regular than others, and they too take longer to learn; and (c) language typology may affect the process of morphological acquisition: suffixes, for instance, are acquired more readily, and earlier, than prefixes. In order to acquire noun and verb morphology, children must first analyze the structure of words heard in input, identify stems and affixes, map consistent meanings onto them, and then begin to use those stems and affixes in new combinations. This process of analyzing form and assigning meaning is a prerequisite for the acquisition of inflectional morphology. It is also a prerequisite ... log in or subscribe to read full text