Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-5g6vh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T13:25:45.973Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The acquisition of agglutinating languages: converging evidence from Tamil*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Parimala Raghavendra  and
Laurence B. Leonard
Parimala Raghavendra
Affiliation:
Purdue University
Laurence B. Leonard*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
*
Department of Audiology & Speech Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 313 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank M. S. Thirumalai for his valuable suggestions. Special thanks are extended to the three children and their families for their participation in the study. We would also like to thank Richard Schwartz and Jack Gandour for their comments.

References

REFERENCES

Aksu-Koc, A. & Slobin, D. I. (1985). The acquisition of Turkish. In Slobin, D. I. (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 1. The data. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ammon, M. S. & Slobin, D. I. (1979). A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences. Cognition 7. 3–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garman, M. (1974). On the acquisition of two complex syntactic constructions in Tamil. Journal of Child Language 1. 65–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schiffman, H. (1979). A grammar of spoken Tamil. Madras: The Christian Literature Society.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1982). Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. & Bever, T. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12. 229–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thirumalai, M. S. (1972). Some aspects of four-year-plus old stage in the acquisition of Tamil phonology. Journal of All India Institute of Speech and Hearing 3. 7–19.Google Scholar