Chapter 7. Acquisition of noun compounds in Estonian
Reili Argus · Language acquisition & language disorders · 2017
The main objective of the chapter is to identify the relevant factors in the acquisition of Estonian noun compounds on the basis of a corpus study of three monolingual Estonian children between 1;3 and 3;1. The results indicate that Estonian children acquire noun compounds early, starting with the most transparent and productive patterns. The importance of productivity can be seen in the recurrence of compounds and their members as independent words, as well as in the coining of novel compounds which occurred with relative frequency.