Bangla Tense Inflections Productivity among Pre-School Children

Abstract

Although there have been different types of studies regarding Bangla verbs, acquisition of Bangla verbs and different types of Bangla tenses; there is a lack of research on the relationship between age and productive tense inflections and development of these inflections for Bangla speaking children. This paper studies the relation between age and productivity of tense inflections of typically developing Bangla speaking pre-school children. The data have been collected from speech samples of 30 children aged 24 months to 48 months through elicited production method. The study finds out the different age range when different tense inflections become productive. It proposes an order of use of the morphological verb inflections of tense and tense inflections for the 30 children in this study. In addition, it explores the probability of a developmental sequence in these inflections in relation to Tomasello’s (2008) usage-based approach for typically developing Bangla speaking pre-school children. The findings of this research can be used to help future studies in the field of Bangla Tense acquisition as well as to create a profile for typically developing children. Moreover, studies dealing with children with language impairments may benefit from the findings.