VOCABULARY AND MORPHOLOGY DEVELOPMENT IN INFANT TRILINGUALS: CASE STUDY

Abstract

The paper presents a case study exploring a trilingual family with parents speaking two different languages and living in a third language country and their children - heterogeneous twins acquiring three languages: English and Russian since the birth and German starting from the age of 1; 11. From the very beginning, the 'one parent - one language principle' has been applied. The types of bilingualism in relation to the multilingual situation, the family background, the status of the languages in the family, the differences of English, Russian and German grammatical systems, and the order of morpheme acquisition in the three languages are considered. The morphological development of trilingual children exhibits similarities in the order of acquisition of certain morphological forms with both monolingual and bilingual children together with variation in the pace of development of the grammatical categories. The first productive morpheme to appear in the speech of the twins was the English plurals. In the development of morphology, a cross-linguistic effect was at work with interaction of the three languages observed during the developmental process. The occurrence of cross-linguistic influence in trilingual language development is determined by both language-external and language-internal factors