The development of morphological verb agreement in childrenís language
involves several different linguistic phenomena. Languageñspecific
influences impact on developmental patterns and age of acquisition. This study
addresses three potential factors involved in the development of verb agreement
morphology in sign languages and more specifically in a case study of one deaf child
of native signing parents acquiring British Sign Language. The data were collected
longitudinally between the ages of 1;10 and 3;0 with analysis concentrating on the
emergence and mastery of the inflectional system for encoding person agreement. The
data are compared with other studies of verb agreement in both signed and spoken
language acquisition. Analysis reveals a relatively late onset of verb use and
protracted development of the agreement system with productive use of inflectional
morphology reached at 3;0. The observed developmental patterns and age of
acquisition are explained by the combined influence of a set of both typological and
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