Development of Nominal Inflection in First Language Acquisition

This book is about the acquisition of the grammar of the noun in children's second and third years of life. The early development of fundamental linguistic distinctions in the universal category of the noun, namely singular vs. plural and nominative vs. accusative as well as other cases, is studied in monolingual children acquiring fourteen languages belonging to eight different language families found within and outside Europe: Germanic, Romance, Slavic/Baltic, Greek, Finnic, Turc, Semitic, and Indian American. One of the main findings of this cross-linguistic study is that children are highly sensitive to the morphological richness of their mother tongue already in the "proto-morphological" stage of development.