The acquisition of morphology and morphophonology in North Saami

This chapter focuses on summarising knowledge from studies about the acquisition of consonant gradation, verb forms, compounds and directives in North Saami. The studies are mainly based on data from two girls under three years of age. With regard to consonant gradation, children first acquire quantitative alternations, before acquiring qualitative alternations and those that are both quantitative and qualitative. Finally, children acquire alternations with complex consonant clusters. The first verb forms to be acquired are morphologically simple target forms without any suffixes. Later, the target forms are also the most frequent, but in addition different types of non-target forms are commonly used. Most target forms stabilise before the child turns three. Among compounds, the most common and most productive subtypes are acquired first, and most compounds are semantically and morphosemantically transparent. The morphological and morphophonological structure of the compounds almost entirely reflects that of the target language. However, in some neologisms, non-heads deviate from non-heads in the target language. The first directives are verbless, but the first verbs also appear at an early stage. After the child turns two, the number of indicatives and imperatives increases in relation to verbless directives, and shortly afterwards the child starts to modify directives with derivational endings and particles.