Child language acquisition data for Greenlandic Eskimo, a highly polysynthetic and morphophonologically complex language, promise to be the source of interesting evidence for general theories of the acquisition of morphological processes. The child in the pilot study here discussed appears already at the age of 2;3 to have mastered the use of a great number of derivational and inflectional affixes together with the morphohonemic patterns for their attachment to different stem types and to other affixes (up to at least four or five following the stem). This presents problems for traditional MLU calculations and calls for clearer criteria of morpheme productivity than may suffice for more analytical languages.
In first language acquisition research so far little is known about the affordances involved in children's acquisition of morphologies of different complexities. This chapter discusses the acquisition of Chintang verbal morphology. Chintang is a Sino-Tibetan (Kiranti) polysynthetic language spoken in a small village in Eastern Nepal by approximately 6,000 speakers. The most complex part of Chintang morphology is verbal inflection. A large number of affixes, verb compounding, and freedom in prefix ordering results in over 1,800 verb forms of single stem verbs and more than 4,000 forms if a secondary stem is involved. In this chapter we assess the challenges of learning such a complex system, and we describe in detail what this acquisition process looks like. For this we analyze a large longitudinal acquisition corpus of Chintang.
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