Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Acquisition of Verbal Morphology in a Polysynthetic Language

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

The first few years of a child's life are spent creating order out of the chaos of her native language, a highly complex signal comprised of a finite number of sounds arranged into an enormous number of words in an infinite number of configurations. This dissertation research seeks to determine how children tease apart the interactions among sound, grammar, and culture to master the intricacies of verbal morphology in a highly concatenative language with productive stem alternation and hierarchical alignment.

It is the first holistic description of the acquisition of any language belonging to its family. This analysis will yield unique insight into how children internalize, shape, and reproduce linguistic knowledge, which has significant implications for the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and developmental psychology, as well as for our broader understanding of the human language faculty.

Using a combined longitudinal and cross-sectional approach, this study will investigate the naturalistic speech of three children between 2;0 and 4;0 over the course of 12 months to describe their morphological development. In close collaboration with a native speaker, the recordings made will be transcribed, translated, and coded for the structural characteristics of child and adult speech to facilitate the comparison of child productions, child-directed speech, and adult-adult discourse overheard by the child.

Qualitative analyses will include which morphemes occur with which verb stems, as well as morpheme productivity. Quantitative analyses will include Mean Length of Utterance, total number of utterances per hour, and frequencies of each verb stem and affix.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.