Mayan Telegraphese: Intonational Determinants of Inflectional Development in Quiche Mayan

Data collected from the Mayan language Quiché suggests that considerable differences may exist across languages in the form of children's first words. Several classes of Quiché words, including the verbs and the positional element k'o:(lik), take ‘terminations’. Although the termination does not encode a simple semantic or syntactic meaning, the children used it correctly in over 86% of their first verbs. The syllable structure and stress rules conspire in Quiché to promote the early acquisition of terminations, suggesting the primacy of intonation in morphological development.