Early functional morphemes: study of language acquisition in Basque monolingual children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59866/eia.v2026i71.328Keywords:
language acquisition, early functional morphemes, functional morphemes, free morphemes, bound morphemes, frequency of occurrence, BasqueAbstract
The study of language acquisition focuses on analysing how humans acquire language naturally. In this paper we investigate the acquisition of functional morphemes. As studies in English and French have shown, their frequency of occurrence and whether they are free or bound influence the perception of the first functional morphemes. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether frequency and their free vs bound status influence early morpheme production. Specifically, we will analyse the order of occurrence of these morphemes in infant productions. The functional morphemes we will analyse are, with regard to nominal morphology, the grammatical cases, articles, partitive, pronouns, demonstratives and, with regard to verbal morphology, the modal morphemes and particles. To calculate the frequency of morphemes we have used the EHME corpus (Acha et al. 2014). We have analysed the speech of four monolingual Basque-speaking children (Valle and Alonso 2015), using the transcriptions of the CHILDES database. The results show that the frequency of morphemes and whether they are bound or free influence the production of the first functional morphemes.
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