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Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA) edited by Alyona Belikova, Luisa Meroni, and Mari Umeda ISBN 978-1-57473-419-5 library binding vii + 490 pages publication date: 2007 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Sandile Gxilishe, Peter de Villiers, and Jill de Villiers The Acquisition of Subject Agreement in Xhosa 114-123 (complete pdf) This study reports data from a longitudinal study of two cohorts of children aged 1-2 and 2-3;3 who are native speakers of Xhosa. The focus of the report is on subject agreement on the verb, conditioned by the elaborate noun class marking on the subject. Several different theories of agreement are considered and their predictions are compared against the data. It is theorized that two parameters involving head direction and agreement are set at around 24 months, accounting for the changes that occur at that time in the children's grammars. |