The Acquisition of Murrinhpatha (Northern Australia)

Abstract

This chapter reports on initial findings of an ongoing large-scale research project into the acquisition of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of the Northern Territory of Australia with complex morphology. The complex verbal structures in Murrinhpatha, which can contain a large number of morphemes and bipartite stem morphology discontinuously distributed throughout the verbal template, raise a multitude of questions for acquisition. In this chapter we focus particularly on the acquisition of the complex predicate system in the verb, and the acquisition of subject-marking categories and tense/aspect/mood. Our findings are based on the language development of five Murrinhpatha acquiring children aged from 2;7–4;11 years.

Polysynthesis: A review

“…structural features allow for the possibility of different degrees of consistency of the polysynthetic type. 17 The study of acquisition of polysynthetic structures is its infancy; see Allen (2017), Forshaw et al (2017), and Stoll, Mazara, and Bickel (2017) for three recent case studies and the references therein. Although much more work needs to be done here, the results suggest that children acquire richer and more complex morphologies differently from how they acquire, say, English morphology.…”

Modeling morphological learning, typology, and change: What can the neural sequence-to-sequence framework contribute?

“…As Harris (2008: 66) says, "there is apparently no need of repair; the system works and can be acquired... there is nothing about our innate endowment that demands that a language simplify". Although some elements of a morphological system may take years to reach adult-like competence (Xanthos et al 2011;Forshaw et al 2017), given enough exposure, learners will eventually produce it with high fidelity. The preference for over-regularization observed in child learners may be a relatively temporary phase of [ 83 ] development (Maratsos 2000;Ambridge et al 2013;Joseph 2011) which does not normally cause sweeping changes in the adult system (for an opposing viewpoint, see Huang and Pinker 2010).…”

Linguistic diversity in first language acquisition research: Moving beyond the challenges

“…Murrinhpatha is a highly polysynthetic language with complex verbal predicates that pose a number of interesting challenges for the child-learner (Forshaw et al, in press). Furthermore, it offers a rare (and diminishing) opportunity to study the acquisition of a polysynthetic Australian language.…”

“…Nonetheless, despite these challenges, the project (while still underway) has been very successful and has brought to light a number of interesting findings regarding the acquisition of complex verbal systems (Forshaw, forthcoming; Forshaw et al, in press) and language socialization in Wadeye (Kelly, Mansfield, Forshaw, Nordlinger, & Wigglesworth, 2014). In the following we outline the methodology we have adopted for the project and the various ways in which we have accommodated the challenges associated with FLA research in this remote location.…”