This paper engages longstanding questions regarding how children acquire morphology in polysynthetic languages. It examines the roles of frequency, perceptual salience, and semantic complexity for morphemes in the acquisition of Northern East Cree possessive inflection, where prefixes and suffixes interact to encode possessors. Two studies analyze naturalistic video recordings of one adult and two children. Study 1 describes the frequency, salience, and complexity of possessor-encoding morphemes in the input. Study 2 traces the acquisition of these morphemes in child speech. Results indicate the acquisition of possessor inflection involves a combination of factors whose influences shift over time. Perceptual salience plays a key role in early noun production, but frequency later corresponds more clearly to acquisitional order for high-frequency morphemes. Complexity is hard to isolate from frequency, although neither factor clearly determines acquisitional order for low-frequency morphemes. The paper concludes by considering implications for science and potential applications for Cree communities.

中文翻译：

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频率、知觉显著性和语义复杂性：东北克里语中占有者屈折的习得


本文探讨了关于儿童如何在多合成语言中获得形态的长期问题。它研究了语素的频率、知觉显著性和语义复杂性在获得东北克里人所有格屈折中的作用，其中前缀和后缀相互作用以编码所有格。两项研究分析了一名成人和两名儿童的自然主义录像。研究 1 描述了输入中拥有子编码语素的频率、显著性和复杂性。研究 2 追踪了儿童言语中这些语素的习得。结果表明，占有者拐点的获得涉及多种因素的组合，这些因素的影响会随着时间的推移而变化。知觉显著性在早期名词产生中起着关键作用，但后来的频率更清楚地对应于高频语素的习得顺序。复杂性很难与频率区分开来，尽管这两个因素都不能明确决定低频语素的习得顺序。本文最后考虑了对科学的影响和对克里社区的潜在应用。