The role of phonology in morphological acquisition

Children’s early utterances often have ‘missing’ grammatical morphemes, suggesting that syntactic and/or semantic representations are still developing. However, recent research suggests that ‘variable’ omission is a predictable artefact of children’s developing phonological abilities, where pre-tonic unstressed grammatical function words such as articles, and inflectional morphemes that form complex consonant clusters, are most likely to show early patterns of omission. This chapter explores these interactions across languages, demonstrating that children’s variable omission of a grammatical morpheme is not random but rather phonologically principled, exhibiting higher probabilities of early production in phonologically ‘unmarked’ contexts where the morpheme can be prosodically licenced.