Abstract
Languages with polysynthetic morphology present excellent opportunities for the study of how complex inflectional systems are acquired. This paper investigates aspects of the acquisition of verbal morphology in Georgian, including person agreement morphemes, roots, and inflectional mini-paradigms. The paper aims to uncover the strategies that children use in the early segmentation of verb morphemes, and specifically, the role of phonological and prosodic factors in this process. The study evaluates the effect of semantic criteria in morpheme extraction, and it is argued that the phonological, prosodic, and semantic properties of morphemes interact in complex ways in the acquisition of verbal morphology.
©2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
