Morphological development in the speech of a Persian-English bilingual child.

Publisher: Springer Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 0333506 Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Print ISSN: 0090-6905 (Print) Linking ISSN: 00906905 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Psycholinguist Res Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: Sept. 2004- : New York : Springer
Original Publication: New York, Plenum Press

Child Language* ; Culture* ; Multilingualism* ; Speech* ; Verbal Learning*; Child, Preschool ; Cross-Cultural Comparison ; Humans ; Iran ; Male ; United States

The present study aims at testing the two dominant hypotheses regarding the development of inflections and other functional categories namely the Structure-Building Model and the Continuity Hypothesis within the generative theory. According to the first view, functional categories are entirely absent in children's early grammars, which contain only projections of lexical categories, most importantly 'nouns' and 'verbs.' This hypothesis holds that utterances produced by children are actually small clauses or verb phrases, and functional categories such as copula, determiners, and genitive are not acquired during the single-word or early multiword stages, but are implemented in the course of further acquisition, at around age 2 or later. The proponents of the second, i.e., the 'Continuity Hypothesis,' on the other hand, argue that functional categories are in fact present in children's early syntax. These two hypotheses will be tested here against empirical data in English and Persian. Thus, longitudinal data will be provided on the acquisition of a few morphemes in the two languages acquired by the subject of the present study (i.e., English and Persian) including determiners, plural marker, genitive, and copula. The significance of the present study lies in the fact that it provides data on two typologically different languages in bilingual first language acquisition and thereby making a contribution to the field.

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Date Created: 20070224 Date Completed: 20070830 Latest Revision: 20181113

20240628

10.1007/s10936-006-9044-5

17318436