Talk:Order of acquisition

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As I don't have a source other than common sense I'd like to suggest another reason. Children grow up in an environment where everyone is speaking all the time and the child is not intently learning their first language, it just happens. A person who learns a second language chooses to do so, and their interest may start on a particular feature of the language such as adjectives, tenses, etc... which could then break the typical pattern.35.10.217.82 (talk) 12:22, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

There is an extensive amount of empirical research in the field of SLA about these phenomena. I think a common-sense argument shouldn't have much weight. (For the matter in question, studies have shown that explicit knowledge about some language feature or "rule" doesn't readily convert into procedural knowledge that can be spontaneously used in language production. That might be surprising, but that's the whole point of studying things thoroughly: to surface some counterintuitive facts about how things really work!) GolDDranks (talk) 13:53, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Universal order?

 * This concept is based on the observation that all children acquire their first language in a fixed, universal order, regardless of the specific grammatical structure of the language they learn.

This may be true within a language, but across languages, it certainly is not. Consider the question of whether Greek, Russian, and Chinese children learn the genitive plural or the dative plural first. Not having watched any child learn these languages, but knowing something of their grammar, I can say for pretty sure that Greeks learn the genitive plural first, Russians learn the dative plural first, and the question doesn't make any sense in Chinese. phma (talk) 18:30, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
 * In Greek, the genitive plural always ends in -ων, except for some personal pronouns in Modern Greek. In Russian, it can end in -ей, -ов, or 0. (I am ignoring undeclined nouns, of which both Greek and Russian have some.)
 * In Russian, the dative plural always ends in -am (-ам, -ям — the 'j' in -jam is part of the stem). In Greek, it can end in -αις, -οις, or -σι.
 * The dative case has fallen out of use in Greek, except for fixed expressions like εν τάξει.
 * Chinese has neither genitive nor dative case.