Sketch emergence and acquisition order of Bangla nominal case markers and postpositions in pre-school children

Abstract

Language acquisition in children exhibits considerable and drastic changes between the ages of 2 and 4 years old, as they progress from producing one or two-word utterances to forming fully fledged sentences. While this phenomenon is more or less commonly observed across languages, children learn to acquire different grammatical properties based on the language to which they are exposed. English and Bangla are typologically different. English focuses more on word order and prepositions to express case relations, whereas Bangla uses inflectional markers. With the typological difference in mind, along with the fact that Bangla is an understudied language, this study aims to provide an approximate list of both the emergence and acquisition order of case marking and postposition. This is the first study on nominal morphology in Bangla with regard to child language acquisition. Spontaneous speech samples from six children ages 2;0 to 4;0 were observed in a mixed-method approach utilizing a cross-sectional research design. Results showed that both case markers and postpositions emerged in children quite early (by 24 months) with low error rates. Children are likely to acquire locatives and nominatives first, followed by genitives and objectives. Both commission and omission errors suggest that children are aware of inflections but they make errors due to some other underlying problem with syntax. The developmental trajectory in children’s use of Bangla case marking highly resembles that of Malayalam and Turkish-speaking children.