Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: Northern Pame (autonym: Xi’iuy) is an Otopamean language situated in the Mexican state of San Luís Potosí. Today over 90% of the Pame population speaks Spanish, and two-year-old children only speak Northern Pame in two Northern Pame villages. The paper explores differences in two-year-old Pame children’s production of words in Northern Pame and Spanish in order to assess the possibility that developmental constraints and/or language shift influence the form and distribution of the children’s words in the two languages. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study is based on video recordings of five Northern Pame children around the age of 2;0. The adult speakers included one father and four mothers. Four hours of production data were analyzed from each of the five children. Data and Analysis: We analyzed the following: (1) the proportion of major lexical categories; (2) the use of the Spanish copula ser in Pame; (3) the mean segmental length of words in Pame and Spanish; and (4) the syllable structure of words in Pame and Spanish. Findings/Conclusions: The overall results demonstrate that the children’s Pame and Spanish words have distinct linguistic properties. Originality: The study is the first to report acquisition data for the Northern Pame language. Northern Pame differs from Spanish on a wide range of lexical and grammatical features. The analysis includes four lexical features. The outcomes for these four features produce a multi-dimensional measure of language differentiation. Significance/Implications: The study shows that Northern Pame parents are successfully passing their home language to their children despite pressure from the contact language. The children acquired the features of Pame words even though some mothers produced over 40% of their nouns in Spanish. The Spanish vocabulary does not inhibit the children’s developing Pame lexical structures.

The study used naturalistic data on the production of nominal prefixes in the Otopamean language Northern Pame (autonym: Xi'iuy) to test Whole Word (constructivist) and Minimal Word (prosodic) theories for the acquisition of inflection. Whole Word theories assume that children store words in their entirety; Minimal Word theories assume that children produce words as binary feet. Northern Pame uses obligatory portmanteaux prefixes to inflect nouns for class, number, animacy and possessor. Singular nouns constitute 90 percent of the nouns that the children hear and yet all five two-year-old children frequently omitted the singular noun prefixes, but produced the low frequency noun suffixes for dual and animate plural. Neither the children's production of the noun-class prefixes nor their prefix overextensions correlated with the adult type and token frequencies of production. Northern Pame children constructed Minimal Words that contain binary feet and disfavor the production of initial, extrametrical prefixes.

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