The acquisition of verbal morphology in Ayöök : child-directed speech, child language, and learning in the home

This dissertation investigates the first-language acquisition of verbal morphology in Ayöök, a polysynthetic Mixe-Zoque language of Oaxaca, Mexico. The recordings analyzed here constitute 44 hours of longitudinal, naturalistic video recorded of three children (2;10-4;7) and their adult caregivers over the course of 12 months. Two comparisons are central to this description: (1) the comparison of verbs in adult-directed speech (ADS) to child-directed speech (CDS); and (2) the comparison of early child productions of verbs to adult input. The first of these comparisons demonstrates that although CDS exhibits some structural differences from ADS, children are nonetheless exposed to much of the morphological richness available in Ayöök from early on in development. The features found to be characteristic of CDS include prompting, frequent use of second-person marking, frequent use of directives, and variation sets. In content, child productions closely resemble CDS: verbs are more frequent than nouns in discourse; the majority of each child's most frequent verb roots also occur frequently in adult speech; and the distribution of morphology across the verbal template in the children's speech closely resembles its distribution in CDS. With respect to the acquisition of verbal morphology, verb-initial person-marking morphology is frequently omitted at this stage, while verb-final TAM morphology evinces higher rates of adultlike production. Most of the nonobligatory morphology acquired by this stage is particularly frequent in CDS. This research adds to the growing body of work describing the acquisition of the world's languages in the face of unprecedented global language shift driven by colonization and globalization. This is at once a contribution to our understanding of how children acquire the diverse linguistic systems of the world and a celebration of children and families as drivers of Indigenous language survivance.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Pierson, Sofia Gottlieb, 1995-

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Meier, Richard P.
• Woodbury, Anthony C.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Law, Danny
• Suslak, Daniel

• Mixe-Zoque
• Child-directed speech
• Child language
• Indigenous language
• Language acquisition

Language dc:language.iso

English

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/58448

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/131102