Abstract
Young children learning Malayalam use morphological categories and inflections quite productively and accurately in general. However, their utterances sometimes show the use of extra morphological material (or commission errors), revealing mismatches between adult and child grammars. In this paper, we present a survey of such errors that are observed in longitudinally collected, spontaneous speech production data of monolingual Malayalam and bilingual Malayalam–English acquiring children in order to identify both the range of commission errors and the underlying grammatical features that may have triggered them. A close analysis of the data shows us that such errors are restricted to a few grammatical loci and shed light on the specific challenges that some grammatical constraints pose for developing grammars.
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Reference50 articles.
1. Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy;Aissen;Natural Language & Linguistic Theory,2003
2. Asher, Ronald E., and Kumari, T. C. (1997). Malayalam, Routledge.
3. The maturation of grammatical principles: Evidence from Russian unaccusatives;Babyonyshev;Linguistic Inquiry,2001
4. Becker, Misha, and Ud Deen, Kamil (2020). Language Acquisition and Development: A Generative Introduction, MIT Press.
5. Psych verbs and θ-theory;Belletti;Natural Language & Linguistic Theory,1988