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The acquisition of morphology by a bilingual child: A whole-word approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Marilyn May Vihman
Marilyn May Vihman*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Marilyn May Vihman, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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Abstract

The avoidance of inflectional markers, a kind of “macrodevelopment” in the acquisition of morphology, is described in this analysis of the strategies displayed by a bilingual child simultaneously exposed to Estonian and to English. A whole-word approach was manifested in: the acquisition of postpositions before case endings; the learning of pronominal case and other suppletive or irregular forms before regular markers were used; the borrowing of the analytic English construction with have into Estonian; and the preference for did + verb for the expression of the English past tense. In interpreting these data the factor of bilingualism per se is weighed against the possible existence of a whole-word approach to language in general as a manifestation of a particular cognitive style.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 141 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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