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 s..