infinitives and indicative/asma siddiki

[Gisela Szagun]

Presumably it depends on the language and on your criterion of
acquisition. In our current study on the acquisition of German we
use two criteria of acquisition: 1) initial acquistion when a child uses
an inflectional morpheme (in this case infinitive or markings for
person) on three different lexical items. 2) we calculate the
percentage of correct use of a particular morpheme in a linguistic
context in which the particular marking is obligatory.
Using these criteria we find that - at least in German - children start
with a root from of the verb which often has a schwa sound ending
but not the proper infinitive ending which is -en. Most children tend
to acquire 3rd person singular ending in -t first, followed by infinitive
which remains unmarked (or as a kind of root form) in a substantial
portion of cases for several months after initial acquisition. This is
less the case for 3rd person singular or 2nd person singular, or 1st
and 3rd person plural (which have identical marking with the
infinitive).
Gisela Szagun
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Prof. Dr. Gisela Szagun
Institut fuer Kognitionsforschung
Fb 5, Psychologie, A 6
Carl-von-Ossietzky Universitaet Oldenburg
Postfach 2503
D-26111 Oldenburg
Germany
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