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

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.