Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2008
The concern of this case study is to show how the parental terms for ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ in Latvian are acquired, paying particular attention to the changing relationship between the input and output forms during the acquisition process. We may note here three questions which we shall attempt to answer. (1) Are parental terms the earliest words used spontaneously by the young child? (2) Does their ‘easier’ word structure allow the child to acquire the adult forms for these words earlier than is the case for the rest of the vocabulary? (3) Do the function and meaning of these parental terms correspond to those of the adults', and if not, what is the difference? And how stable are the meanings of these words during the first years of life?