In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9–2;10 and 2;3–3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring Malayalam-English between the ages 1;9–2;8, 2;0–3;0 and 1;10–2;11 to recover the underlying grammatical constraints that govern the correct productions as well as errors across monolingual and bilingual contexts. We find rules that reference lexico-semantic properties to be particularly challenging to young children.

Young children learning Malayalam use morphological categories and inflections quite productively and accurately in general. However, their utterances sometimes show the use of extra morphological material (or commission errors), revealing mismatches between adult and child grammars. In this paper, we present a survey of such errors that are observed in longitudinally collected, spontaneous speech production data of monolingual Malayalam and bilingual Malayalam–English acquiring children in order to identify both the range of commission errors and the underlying grammatical features that may have triggered them. A close analysis of the data shows us that such errors are restricted to a few grammatical loci and shed light on the specific challenges that some grammatical constraints pose for developing grammars.

In this paper, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9–2;10 and 2;3–3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring Malayalam-English between the ages 1;9–2;8, 2;0–3;0, and 1;10–2;11 to recover the underlying grammatical constraints that govern the correct productions as well as errors across monolingual and bilingual contexts. We find that rules that reference lexico-semantic properties to be particularly challenging to the young children.

Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond Ghil'ad Zuckermann (2020) New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 352 ISBN: 9780199812776 (hbk) ISBN: 9780199812790 (pbk)