Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition

Project financed by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (1994 – March 2012) and by the University of Vienna (from April 2012 onwards)

Project leader: Wolfgang U. Dressler

The “Crosslinguistic project on pre- and protomorphology in language acquisition” was founded in 1994 by Wolfgang U. Dressler (Head of the Department of Linguistics and Communication Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences) and aims at investigating the early phases of morphological development in a large sample of different languages that show important typological variation.

The project actually encompasses 18 different languages, coming from the Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Semitic language families, plus Turkish, and the Meso-American language Yucatec Maya. The data analyzed are longitudinal speech corpora collected from the child’s onset of speech until the age of about 3 years, transcribed and coded according to the norms of the international Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES).