ABSTRACT
Crosslinguistic studies of related languages indicate that small differences in the realization of morphological systems may cause variation in the process and timetable of acquisition. For example, Slobin (1966) and Smoczynska (1985) found that small phonetic differences in the pronunciation of gender suffixes in Polish and Russian significantly affected the timetable of acquisition of gender. Peters (in press) called these studies minimal pair studies, involving minimal pair sets of languages—closely related languages with similar morphological systems.
