Mithun M
J Child Lang. 1989 Jun;16(2):285-312. doi: 10.1017/s0305000900010424.
Polysynthetic languages can present special extraction puzzles to children, due to the length of their words. A number of hypotheses concerning children's strategies for acquiring morphology, originally proposed on the basis of their approaches to somewhat simpler systems, are confirmed by observations of five children acquiring Mohawk. Among the Mohawk children, the earliest segmentation of words was phonological rather than morphological: stressed syllables, usually penultimate or antepenultimate, were extracted first. Ultimate syllables were then added, confirming the salience of the ends of words. During this time, distinctions expressed by adults in affixes were either omitted or expressed analytically. Acquisition then moved leftward by syllables. When most utterances were long enough to include pronominal prefixes as well as roots, morphological structure was apparently discovered. It is not surprising that the pronouns should trigger this awareness, since they are frequent, appearing with every verb and most nouns, they are functional, and they are semantically transparent. From this point on, the children acquired affixes primarily according to their utility and semantic transparency rather than their phonological shape or position.
由于多式综合语单词的长度，这类语言可能会给儿童带来特殊的提取难题。一些关于儿童获取形态学策略的假设最初是基于他们对相对简单语言系统的学习方法提出的，对五名学习莫霍克语的儿童的观察证实了这些假设。在学习莫霍克语的儿童中，单词最早的切分是基于语音而非形态：通常是倒数第二个或倒数第三个音节的重读音节首先被提取出来。然后添加最后一个音节，这证实了单词结尾的显著性。在此期间，成人在词缀中表达的区别要么被忽略，要么以分析的方式表达。然后按音节向左推进学习。当大多数话语足够长，能够包含代词前缀和词根时，形态结构显然被发现了。代词引发这种认知并不奇怪，因为它们出现频率高，与每个动词和大多数名词一起出现，它们具有功能性，而且语义透明。从这一点开始，儿童主要根据词缀的效用和语义透明度而非语音形式或位置来学习词缀。
