TY - JOUR
T1 - Elicited production of case-marking in Russian and Serbian children
T2 - are diminutive nouns easier to inflect
AU - Kempe, Vera
AU - Ševa, Nada
AU - Brooks, Patricia J.
AU - Mironova, Natalija
AU - Pershukova, Angelina
AU - Fedorova, Olga
PY - 2009/5
Y1 - 2009/5
N2 - Two experiments used an elicited speech-production paradigm to explore children's acquisition of noun case-marking inflections. Russian (N = 24, 2;10— 4;6 years) and Serbian children (N = 24, 2;10—4;11) were asked to produce prepositional phrases requiring genitive or dative inflections of masculine and feminine, familiar and novel, simplex (vaza [Ru/Se: vase]) and diminutive (Ru: vazochka, Se: vazica) nouns. Across languages, children produced fewer case-marking errors with familiar compared to novel nouns, and diminutive compared to simplex nouns. The diminutive advantage occurred despite a markedly lower frequency of diminutive usage in Serbian than Russian child-directed speech. This suggests that in acquiring richly inflected languages, children most readily construct low-level generalizations of inflectional changes applying to morpho-phonologically homogeneous clusters of words like diminutives.
AB - Two experiments used an elicited speech-production paradigm to explore children's acquisition of noun case-marking inflections. Russian (N = 24, 2;10— 4;6 years) and Serbian children (N = 24, 2;10—4;11) were asked to produce prepositional phrases requiring genitive or dative inflections of masculine and feminine, familiar and novel, simplex (vaza [Ru/Se: vase]) and diminutive (Ru: vazochka, Se: vazica) nouns. Across languages, children produced fewer case-marking errors with familiar compared to novel nouns, and diminutive compared to simplex nouns. The diminutive advantage occurred despite a markedly lower frequency of diminutive usage in Serbian than Russian child-directed speech. This suggests that in acquiring richly inflected languages, children most readily construct low-level generalizations of inflectional changes applying to morpho-phonologically homogeneous clusters of words like diminutives.
U2 - 10.1177/0142723708092441
DO - 10.1177/0142723708092441
M3 - Article
VL - 29
SP - 147
EP - 165
JO - First Language
JF - First Language
SN - 0142-7237
IS - 2
ER -