Kolmikute keeleline areng ja individuaalsed erinevused muutemorfoloogia omandamisel
Language Development in Triplets and Individual Differences in Their Acquisition of Inflectional Morphology

Summary/Abstract: Language acquisition by triplets learning one and the same language in the same language environment is discussed. As was revealed by analysis of spontaneous utterances triplets start acquiring inflectional morphology a little later than single children and, in comparison with the latter, they use more deictics. Individual differences occurred in the different order of acquiring the infectional morphology of different parts of speech. Most of the rote-learned word forms acquired in the premorphological period were the same for all three children, the first differences emerged in the protomorphological period. Two children entered the active phase of acquiring inflectional morphology together, attacking both nouns and verbs, whereas the third preferred learning the verb inflection first. Although her vocabulary was slightly smaller than that of her triplet sister and brother, it was his vocabulary that contained the most verbs and place adverbs. This indicates that a verb-central acquisition strategy may concern not only inflectional morphology but also lexicon.

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