Is Danish difficult to acquire? Evidence from Nordic past-tense studies

2011/01/05 by Dorthe Bleses, Hans Basbøll, Werner Vach · 1 voice · 1 citation
Psychology · #Language Development and Disorders #Reading and Literacy Development #Phonetics and Phonology Research

paper · doi:10.1080/01690965.2010.515107

openalex publication_date 2011/01/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

Cross-linguistic findings have shown that Danish children's early receptive vocabulary development is slower relative to children learning other languages. In this study, we examined whether Danish children's acquisition of inflectional past-tense morphology is delayed relative to Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish children. Our comparison of data from experimental studies of 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children's past-tense acquisition revealed that Danish children scored lowest across all measures of past tense. Analyses of the morphological and phonetic characteristics of these languages suggest that phonetic differences in strength and salience of cues relevant for the identification and segmentation of suffixes may account for cross-linguistic differences. The results support the hypothesis that the phonetic structure of Danish may delay these children's language development relative to other languages.

Citations

• Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants
• Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies
• Danish

Cited by

• When Too Many Vowels Impede Language Processing: An Eye-Tracking Study of Danish-Learning Children

Discussions

• Up to 8 years of age, Danish children have more difficulties with inflectional morphology, e.g. declining regular and irregular verbs in simple past (often characterised by a -de ending, largely reduc [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]