Noun and verb inflectional morphology among Tamil speaking 3year old children with and without language delay

Abstract

Inflectional morphology is an integral component of language development among children The patterns of acquisition of noun and verb inflections among children are influenced by the typological characteristics of the ambient language The study examined noun and verb inflectional morphology among 3year old children speaking Tamil an agglutinative language of the Dravidian language family A group of 80 children with typical language skills and 41 children with language delay further sub grouped into two groups participated in the cross sectional study Children completed two broad categories of tasks a closed set picture elicitation task for eliciting specific noun and verb inflections and an elicited language sample task involving picture description Both tasks were developed and validated as part of the study Children with typical language acquired the dative noun case locative noun case person number gender PNG inflections simple present simple past and future tenses Children with language delays did not acquire any of the inflections except the simple present tense and PNG inflections which were emerging Error patterns on inflections revealed a developmental pattern with increasing complexity accompanied by systematic substitution strategies based on the children language competence Language sample analysis further revealed different patterns of inflectional morphology and parts of speech categories among the three groups of children Findings contribute to a much needed data corpus on understanding the acquisition of inflectional morphology among children speaking Tamil a morphologically rich language Such data are important for guiding the development of language specific assessment tools for identifying Tamil speaking children with language delays newline