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The influence of typology and modality on the acquisition of verb agreement morphology in British Sign Language

Gary Morgan

City University, London

Isabelle Barrière

Yeled V'Yalda Multilingual Development and Education Research Institute, New York

Bencie Woll

University College London

The development of morphological verb agreement in childrenís language involves several different linguistic phenomena. Languageñspecific influences impact on developmental patterns and age of acquisition. This study addresses three potential factors involved in the development of verb agreement morphology in sign languages and more specifically in a case study of one deaf child of native signing parents acquiring British Sign Language. The data were collected longitudinally between the ages of 1;10 and 3;0 with analysis concentrating on the emergence and mastery of the inflectional system for encoding person agreement. The data are compared with other studies of verb agreement in both signed and spoken language acquisition. Analysis reveals a relatively late onset of verb use and protracted development of the agreement system with productive use of inflectional morphology reached at 3;0. The observed developmental patterns and age of acquisition are explained by the combined influence of a set of both typological and modality-specific factors.

Key Words: Argument structure • deaf • morphology • non-concatenative • space

First Language, Vol. 26, No. 1, 19-43 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0142723706060739
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