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Description:
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This book presents a study of the acquisition of verbal and adjectival
agreement
inflection in typically developing, monolingual Dutch children. The author
shows that Dutch children correctly inflect verbs for person and number
with both existing and non-existing verbs from the age of three onward. The
results of a preferential listening experiment reveal that perceptual
sensitivity precedes production: Infants are able to discriminate between
correct and incorrect number agreement from the age of 18 months. Dutch
children acquire adjectival inflection as early as verbal inflection, even
though adjectival inflection is more complex, comprising gender, number and
definiteness. Analyses of children's performance with adjectival inflection
point to substantial asymmetries between the development of grammatical
knowledge, on the one hand, and lexical knowledge, on the other. While
children acquire grammatical rules early, it takes them much longer to
learn the relevant lexical properties of nouns (e.g. grammatical gender).
It is argued that salience factors related to form, function, and frequency
play a role in the development of inflectional morphemes. Methodologically,
this study stresses the importance of meticulous testing and fine-grained
analyses. The outcomes of the experiments are a welcome and valuable
complement to existing spontaneous speech data. The book is of interest to
scholars who work in the field of language acquisition, developmental
psychology, as well as to linguists studying inflectional morphology.
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