Getting to the Root of the Matter

Spontaneous speech data from three monolingual Turkish-speaking children between the ages 2;1 and 2;8 revealed that children produce bare lexical stems in ungrammatical contexts before they use grammatical morphemes productively. Given that root words are very rare in Turkish, the fact that Turkish children produce them indicates that they are able to decompose multimorphemic words into root + grammatical affixes. We also tested the hypothesis that when the correspondence between morphological form and grammatical meaning is one-to-one, morphemes are likely to be acquired earlier than when the correspondence between form and meaning is one-to-many (Slobin, 1973). Three grammatical morphemes, despite appearing equally frequently in adult speech, were acquired at different stages by children. The past tense inflection –di, which has a one-to-one correspondence between morphological form and grammatical meaning, is the morpheme that was acquired first by the children.