caa a22 4500 386359180 CHVBK 20180307111909.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198906 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0305000900010424 doi S0305000900010424 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0305000900010424 Mithun Marianne University of California, Santa Barbara The acquisition of polysynthesis [Elektronische Daten] [Marianne Mithun] Polysynthetic languages can present special extraction puzzles to children, due to the length of their words. A number of hypotheses concerning children's strategies for acquiring morphology, originally proposed on the basis of their approaches to somewhat simpler systems, are confirmed by observations of five children acquiring Mohawk. Among the Mohawk children, the earliest segmentation of words was phonological rather than morphological: stressed syllables, usually penultimate or antepenultimate, were extracted first. Ultimate syllables were then added, confirming the salience of the ends of words. During this time, distinctions expressed by adults in affixes were either omitted or expressed analytically. Acquisition then moved leftward by syllables. When most utterances were long enough to include pronominal prefixes as well as roots, morphological structure was apparently discovered. It is not surprising that the pronouns should trigger this awareness, since they are frequent, appearing with every verb and most nouns, they are functional, and they are semantically transparent. From this point on, the children acquired affixes primarily according to their utility and semantic transparency rather than their phonological shape or position. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Journal of Child Language Cambridge University Press 16/2(1989-06), 285-312 0305-0009 16:2<285 1989 16 JCL https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010424 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010424 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Mithun Marianne University of California, Santa Barbara NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of Child Language Cambridge University Press 16/2(1989-06), 285-312 0305-0009 16:2<285 1989 16 JCL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge