The acquisition of agglutinating languages: converging evidence from Tamil
- 1 June 1989
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Journal of Child Language
- Vol. 16 (2) , 313-322
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900010436
Abstract
The acquisition of verb inflections in Tamil, an agglutinating language, was investigated in three 2-year-old children. The findings revealed a high percentage use of verb inflections indicating tense, aspect, modality, person, number and gender by all three children. Explanations for this early, almost error-free acquisition are discussed in terms of the facilitating properties of agglutinating languages.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflectionsCognition, 1982
- A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentencesCognition, 1979
- On the acquisition of two complex syntactic constructions in TamilJournal of Child Language, 1974