First Language Acquisition from a Verbal and Nominal Morphological Perspective (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), course: Linguistics: Morphology, language: English, abstract: Although the English language consists of only little verbal morphology nowadays, the development of morphological first language acquisition of growing children is critically discussed. Specialists argue whether one can say that there is a clear development which appears during the same stages of different children.

This paper will shed light on morphological aspects, especially on verbal and nominal morphological developments. The examined approaches are of English-speaking children. However, the primarily involved morphological phenomenon is contemporary over- and undermarking, as well as over regularizations. To begin with, general errors in morphological language acquisition will be displayed, followed by a concrete example of the child Nina from the CHILDES Database of the Suppes corpus. In order of being more comparative, some examples of the Brown study will be given.

In the second part, the results of the children acquiring English in my own observation study will be discussed and compared to the results given. All these examples and comparisons of the first language acquisition of English-speaking children will lead to questioning, if different children acquire language during the same period of time and if they pass through equal stages on their way to an "own" and independent adult language.