Edited by Minna Kirjavainen, Ágnes Lukács and Virve-Anneli Vihman
This book is the first comprehensive state-of-the-art overview of the first language acquisition of four Finno-Ugric languages: Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, and North Saami. Ten chapters review research on phonological, lexical, and grammatical development, bringing the research within the… read more
This chapter reviews research on morphosyntactic acquisition of Estonian as a first language, focussing on early development through the age of six. The field has made great advances over the last three decades in Estonia, with the development of child language corpora in the 2000s and the… read more
We compared the acquisition of symmetrical and asymmetrical Differential Object Marking (DOM) within Estonian, which employs symmetrical DOM (alternation between overtly case-marked objects) with asymmetrical subsystems (alternation between marked and unmarked objects) for imperatives,… read more
In the children’s film Toy Story, toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and… read more
The emergence and later fading of two phonological templates – a ‘palatal’ template and consonant harmony – are investigated in the first 500 words produced by a child acquiring Estonian and English. Throughout the period the child's use of palatal forms, in particular, considerably exceeds their… read more
