Frequency, perceptual salience, and semantic complexity: The acquisition of possessor inflection in Northern East Cree.

This paper engages longstanding questions regarding how children acquire morphology in polysynthetic languages. It examines the roles of frequency, perceptual salience, and semantic complexity for morphemes in the acquisition of Northern East Cree possessive inflection, where prefixes and suffixes interact to encode possessors. Two studies analyze naturalistic video recordings of one adult and two children.

Rules and exceptions: A Tolerance Principle account of the possessive suffix in Northern East Cree.

Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix - in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the suffix, which has a complex distribution throughout the lexicon.

The development of possession in the L1 acquisition of Northern East Cree.

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.