The acquisition of noun class morphology in Eegimaa: Early signs of system building

In this paper we examine young children’s acquisition of the prefixal noun class system of Eegimaa, a Jóola language spoken in Senegal (Atlantic family, Niger-Congo). The analysis is based on spontaneous, spoken data representing a mixed design (longitudinal and cross-sectional), with nine-and-a-half hours of recordings, including nine children, aged between 1;10 and 3;2. The data yielded 967 spontaneously produced noun tokens. Two children’s productions are examined more closely through a series of longitudinal recordings, which show that the majority of nouns are produced accurately, with target-like noun class prefixes, already present from the earliest ages, a finding that differs from earlier research on the distantly related Bantu languages (see Demuth 2003 for an overview). Non-target-like nouns, produced with omitted, substituted or filler prefixes, amount to less than one fifth of the noun tokens produced in the transcribed recordings. Across the group of children, accuracy is already high at age 2 years, at 73%, and increases to 94% by age three. We discuss the types of errors made by the children and possible reasons for them, and implications of the learning trajectories for understanding morphological acquisition.