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Reili Argus. Language Development in Triplets and Individual Differences in Their Acquisition of Inflectional Morphology |
2007, nr. 3 |
Language acquisition by triplets learning one
and the same language in the same language environment is discussed.
As was revealed by analysis of spontaneous utterances triplets
start acquiring inflectional morphology a little later than single
children and, in comparison with the latter, they use more deictics.
Individual differences occurred in the different order of acquiring
the infectional morphology of different parts of speech. Most
of the rote-learned word forms acquired in the premorphological
period were the same for all three children, the first differences
emerged in the protomorphological period. Two children entered
the active phase of acquiring inflectional morphology together,
attacking both nouns and verbs, whereas the third preferred learning
the verb inflection first. Although her vocabulary was slightly
smaller than that of her triplet sister and brother, it was his
vocabulary that contained the most verbs and place adverbs. This
indicates that a verb-central acquisition strategy may concern
not only inflectional morphology but also lexicon.
Keywords: Estonian, first language
acquisition, triplets, infectional morphology.
Reili Argus (b. 1967), MA, Tallinn University,
Chair of Estonian Language, lecturer
reili.argus@tlu.ee
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