Simplification principles and child language development in Armenian

Abstract

At certain stages of their general cognitive development  and language acquisition, children apparently employ their innately growing (cognitive) knowledge and skills to meet the challenges they face in L1 acquisition. Among other things, children use different sets of simplification strategies, such as cropping words, replacing or displacing syllables or syllabic constituents,   omitting suffixes, and using simpler syntax. We catalog processes like fortition, reduplication, and the various stages of acquisition.
This paper presents some language development data in Armenian children. Empirically, our study is one of the few (if only) known studies on the language acquisition of Armenian. The data  provides valuable theoretical insight into the strategies that children pursue in communication, as well as in cognitive processing of speech.