Children’s verbal inflection development in Pitjantjatjara: An acquisition sketch

Abstract

This paper reports on a small-scale, naturalistic corpus study of the development of children's verbal inflectional morphology in Pitjantjatjara, an Indigenous language of Central Australia with a large yet regular verbal paradigm. We followed recent recommendations for initial sketch descriptions of under-resourced languages and analyzed a 5-hour corpus of caregiver–child interaction with five focus children between the ages of two and four. Results suggested three broad stages in order of emergence: children initially used verbs in imperative, present, and past tense forms; they then showed increasing lexically-specific inflectional range within this ‘core group’ of categories; and finally..