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Early lexical acquisition in the Wichi language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2020

Andrea S. TAVERNA  and
Sandra R. WAXMAN
Andrea S. TAVERNA*
Affiliation:
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (National Research Council) Formosa, Argentina
Sandra R. WAXMAN
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Instituto de Investigaciones sobre Lenguaje, Sociedad y Territorio, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional de Formosa (UNaF), Av. Gutnisky 3200, C.P. 3600 Formosa, Argentina. Tel.: +54 03704-452473; E-mail: andtaverna@gmail.com
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Abstract

This research brings new evidence on early lexical acquisition in Wichi, an under-studied indigenous language in which verbs occupy a privileged position in the input and in conjunction with nouns are characterized by a complex and rich morphology. Focusing on infants ranging from one- to three-year-olds, we analyzed the parental report of infants’ vocabulary (Study 1) and naturalistic speech samples of children and their caregivers (Study 2). Results reveal that: (1) although verbs predominate in the linguistic input, children's lexicons favor nouns over verbs; (2) children's early noun-advantage decreases, coming into closer alignment with the patterns in the linguistic input at a MLU of 1.5; and (3) this early transition is temporally related to children's increasing productive command over the grammatical categories that characterize the morphology of both nouns and verbs. These findings emphasize the early effects of language-specific properties of the input, broadening the vantage point from which to view the lexical acquisition process.

Keywords

lexical acquisitioncross-linguistic developmentWichi language
Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 47 , Issue 5 , September 2020 , pp. 1052 - 1072
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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