The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages

Abstract

One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially more challenging, when the child is learning a polysynthetic language – a language in which words are highly morphologically complex, expressing in a single word what in English takes a multi‐word clause. To date, there has been no cross‐linguistic survey of how children approach this puzzle and learn polysynthetic languages. This paper aims to provide such a survey, including a discussion of some of the general findings in the literature regarding the acquisition of polysynthetic systems.

Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language

“…In 1989, Mithun noted that the opportunities to study the acquisition of morphologically complex languages were diminishing due to the death of those languages and that "there is much to discover in a short time" (p. 286). Now, three decades later, when this call is even more imperative (Kelly et al, 2014), the current results offer three main findings. First, infants acquiring Wichi reveal a noun advantage, one that is not mirrored in the input they receive.…”

Multiunit Sequences in First Language Acquisition

“…Here, however, it is important to consider the degree of systematicity in the ways in which these forms are combined. Kelly, Wigglesworth, Nordlinger, and Blythe suggest that “Polysynthetic languages contain words with many morphemes and expressing complex grammatical concepts, but may be relatively regular in the templatic sequence in which they are used” (: 61). Although they express doubt about the usefulness of chunk learning in these types of languages, if children are learning these templates as partially productive strings, with some slots becoming schematic before others, this could provide a way into the structure.…”

Polysynthesis in the Acquisition of Inuit Languages

“…A first stage of producing individual morphemes is also found in other morphologically complex languages including Navajo, Quechua, and Tzeltal (Kelly et al, 2014) -all languages with relatively little fusion across morpheme boundaries in the adult language. In contrast, the first productions in morphologically complex languages with more fusion between morphemes (e.g.…”

“…The majority of research to date has focused on the acquisition of analytic languages (e.g., English, German, Japanese), with a relatively small but growing amount of research on the acquisition of synthetic languages (e.g., Turkish, Hebrew, Hungarian). However, comparatively few studies of language acquisition focus on the acquisition of polysynthetic languages (Kelly, Wigglesworth, Nordlinger & Blythe 2014). In the present chapter we take a step towards ameliorating this situation by bringing together the relevant research literature on the acquisition of Inuit languages, often cited as a quintessential example of polysynthesis.…”