Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A common feature of early speech is that children use case marking incorrectly. Several researchers have proposed that the child's mistakes are limited to the misuse of nominative case, and are corrected once the child acquires verbal morphology. In this paper I will show that this characterization of the problem is incorrect: children misuse all case forms, not just nominative case. In addition, I will show that the child's use of case is related to the acquisition of nominal morphology, not verbal. Case marking can be better understood as a result of the child learning the productive agreement processes of his language. This characterization accounts for the acquisition of case and the "waffling" which children exhibit, and does so within a unified theory of lexical and syntactic acquisition.