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In:First Language Acquisition in Finno-Ugric Languages
Edited by Minna Kirjavainen, Ágnes Lukács and Virve-Anneli Vihman
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 33] 2025
► pp. 156–197

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The acquisition of Finnish morphology and syntax

 | University of the West of England
 | Tampere University
Published online: 13 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.33.06kir
Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the grammatical development of children acquiring Finnish as their first language. The chapter will first describe the key child language datasets in Finnish, then present a review of the inflectional morphology and syntax research drawing from the existing diary, corpus and experimental studies and lastly suggest avenues for further study. The rich inflectional morphology of the Finnish language has attracted extensive interest among child language researchers. Thus, the morphological acquisition is a more central focus in this chapter. We will describe the morphological development from the earliest rote-learned forms to miniparadigms and to the productive use of noun and verb inflections. Our review of syntactic development of Finnish addresses word order, as well as the development of various clause/sentence types including complex sentences.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Morphology
    • 3.1Finnish morphology
      • 3.1.1Finnish nominal morphology
      • 3.1.2Finnish verb morphology
    • 3.2The development of morphosyntax in Finnish children
      • 3.2.1Emergence of morphosyntactic items
        • 3.2.1.1Nouns
          • Noun errors
        • 3.2.1.2Noun phrases
        • 3.2.1.3Verbs
          • Verb errors
        • 3.2.1.4Individual and dialectal differences
      • 3.2.2Finnish children’s processing of morphologically complex words
  • 4.Syntax
    • 4.1Word order
    • 4.2Simple sentences: Argument structure and morphosyntactic complexity
    • 4.2Clause types
      • 4.2.1Mood inflection and interrogative clauses
      • 4.2.2Negation, modality and existential clauses
    • 4.3Complex sentences
      • 4.3.1From implicitly complex sentences to complex sentences
      • 4.3.2Relative clauses
  • 5.Summary and future directions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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