Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children

Abstract

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific developmental information is not available in Bangla and that properties of these verb forms render them suitable for exploring how language typology contributes to the learnability of verb morphology in emerging child language. Children’s performance on these forms was assessed through form-specific language elicitation tasks and spontaneous language samples. Three stages of development of verb morphology were identified by consideration of accuracy of production and error types.