Markedness, input frequency, and the acquisition of inflection: Evidence from Basque/Spanish bilingual children

Abstract

Crosslinguistically, children begin producing the person and number features of personal pronouns in a similar order. This article explored whether the same is true of verbal agreement morphology and evaluated three potential explanatory hypotheses which could account for a universal sequence of the development of phi features: the existence of an innate feature geometry, statistical properties in the input, and the organization of verbal paradigms. I examined these hypotheses in light of data from 20 bilingual children aged 2;00–3;06 years acquiring Basque and Spanish as well as child-directed speech from four adult speakers of Basque and Spanish. The results did not fit the predictions of the feature-geometric analysis nor the frequency-driven approach. However, there is evidence of paradigm building from the children’s early errors in the production of finite verbs.