Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 06 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter reviews findings from the field of first language acquisition that shed light on morphological theory. The focus is on the acquisition of multimorphemic words and the distinction between regular and irregular inflection. The first aim of the chapter is to show that child data should always be interpreted against the background of developments in other areas that may influence children’s morphological performance. Child data have played a role in the debate about single versus dual route processing, which overlaps in part with the theoretical distinction between full and impoverished lexical entries. The second aim of the chapter is to provide a balanced overview of the empirical arguments that may support these different theoretical views. Specific attention is paid to the interpretation of developmental errors, languages other than English, and patterns observed in atypical language learners.

Keywords: language acquisition, development, inflection, past tense debate, omission error, overregularization, Specific Language Impairment, Williams Syndrome, input frequency

Elma Blom

Elma Blom is Professor at the Department of Special Education at Utrecht University where she teaches about language development. Her research and publications are about developmental language disorder, the parallel development of multiple languages in immigrant children, and the relationship between language and cognition both in language-impaired and multilingual children. Besides theoretical issues, she works on the improvement of diagnostic tools for multilingual children.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.