Learning inflectional systems is a crucial task taken up early on by toddlers. From a distributional point of view, inflection is characterized by high token frequency, and general and obligatory applicability (Bybee 1985). From a semantic point of view, inflection exhibits transparency, regularity and predictability. These aspects of inflection render it highly salient for young children and facilitate the initial mapping of meaning or function onto inflectional segments. At the same time, many inflectional systems are also fraught with morphological and morpho-phonological complexity, opacity, inconsistency, irregularity, and unpredictability. These structural aspects of inflection constitute a serious challenge to the successful launching of this central function of human language. Most studies of inflectional morphology start from an analysis of the adult system, and reason from that system the when and how of children’s acquisition. However, the discrepancy between the complexity of the mature system, on the one hand, and the need to facilitate acquisition, on the other, needs to be resolved. Child Directed Speech (CDS) – simply defined as input to children from caregivers and early peer-group – has been shown to account for emerging lexical and morpho-syntactic features in