Early verb production in Nungon

Abstract

This brief research report presents a comparison of the early verb productions of four children acquiring the Papuan language Nungon as a first language. A previous case study examined only verb productions of the child TO; these are now compared with those from three other children, studied from ages 1;1–2;7 (non-dense corpus; one child, AB) and ages 2;4–2;7 (dense corpora; two children, MK and MF). Two of the most striking features of TO’s early verb productions are shown to be outliers relative to the other three children: her ‘root nominals’ stage and her delayed near future tense production. Neither of these is transparently linked to patterns in her parents’ child-directed speech. The other children also display differing strategies into language production. The dense corpus is beneficial for catching tokens of less-frequent inflections, but the frequent long recording sessions may be difficult for at least one child to tolerate.