Call for Papers - Workshop on ''Acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology''

[susanna.bartsch at email.de]

Call for papers
Workshop on ''Acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology''

We cordially invite abstracts for the above mentioned workshop which will be held during the 12th International Morphology Meeting in Budapest, May 25-28, 2006.

Submission deadline for abstracts: Dec 15 05

In Humboldt's and Sapir's language typology, the languages of the world are classified according to their inflectional morphology: They distinguished isolating from analytical from synthetic languages; the latter can be inflectional, agglutinative, or polysynthetic. In language acquisition, the intensity or richness of inflection is a further important feature for the detection of the structure of the target language and the course of the acquisition process. Similarly, in language impairments, the distribution and severity of defects may depend on the structure of the inflectional morphology of the respective language.

Against this typological background, we aim in our workshop to discuss findings and hypotheses concerning universal and language-specific factors playing a role in the acquisition and impairments of inflectional morphology.

The workshop aims to contribute to suggestions towards the following general questions:

1) How does the morphological typology of the target language(s) influence the L1 acquisition process or the results of language impairments?
2) What are characteristic delays in the acquisition of inflectional morphology in impaired children (in dependence of the morphological typology of the input)?
3) Which conclusions about the structure of inflectional systems can be drawn from the study of child language acquisition and language impairments?

We invite contributions from all theoretical backgrounds dealing with acquisition or impairments of inflectional morphology, especially if they take the typological variety of human languages into account. We particularly encourage studies comparing the morphological acquisition process in impaired and unimpaired children.

Colleagues interested in participating in the workshop are invited to announce their participation as soon as possible and to send a one-page abstract (preferably pdf) by e-mail to both of the organizers, Wolfgang U. Dressler and Dagmar Bittner, by December 15th, 2005:
wolfgang.dressler at univie.ac.at,
dabitt at zas.gwz-berlin.de

Sincerely,
Wolfgang U. Dressler and Dagmar Bittner