The acquisition of Irish as a first language in the Gaeltacht

This paper is a study of the acquistion of Irish as a first language in some Irish-speaking areas of Ireland. In addition to an analysis of data from various stages of the acquisition process relating to phonology, the lexicon and syntactic structures, the nature of language acquisition strategies, the early acquisition of the basic sounds of English, and the apparent lack of functional categories in the language of children at the earliest stages of acquisition are discussed.