Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:12:38.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Acquisition of gender agreement in Lithuanian: Exploring the effect of diminutive usage in an elicited production task*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

INETA SAVICKIENĖ ,
VERA KEMPE  and
PATRICIA J. BROOKS
INETA SAVICKIENĖ*
Affiliation:
Vytautas Magnus University
VERA KEMPE
Affiliation:
University of Abertay, Dundee
PATRICIA J. BROOKS
Affiliation:
College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of City University of New York
*
Address for correspondence: Ineta Savickienė, Regional Studies Department, Vytautas Magnus University, Donelaičio 58, Kaunas LT-44248, Lithuania. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines Lithuanian children's acquisition of gender agreement using an elicited production task. Lithuanian is a richly inflected Baltic language, with two genders and seven cases. Younger (N=24, mean 3 ; 1, 2 ; 5–3 ; 8) and older (N=24, mean 6 ; 3, 5 ; 6–6 ; 9) children were shown pictures of animals and asked to describe them after hearing the animal's name. Animal names differed with respect to familiarity (novel vs. familiar), derivational status (diminutive vs. simplex) and gender (masculine vs. feminine). Analyses of gender-agreement errors based on adjective and pronoun usage indicated that younger children made more errors than older children, with errors more prevalent for novel animal names. For novel animals, and for feminine nouns, children produced fewer errors with nouns introduced in diminutive form. These results complement findings from several Slavic languages (Russian, Serbian and Polish) that diminutives constitute a salient cluster of word forms that may provide an entry point for the child's acquisition of noun morphology.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , June 2009 , pp. 477 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This project was supported by a Fulbright grant to I. Savickienė, and a PSC-CUNY award to P. J. Brooks. We thank Ingrida Balčiūnienė and Laura Kamandulytė for assistance with data collection and coding.

References

REFERENCES

Albright, A. & Hayes, B. (2003). Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/experimental study. Cognition 90, 119–61.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S. (1987). What is learned in acquiring word classes: A step toward an acquisition theory. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition, 65–87. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Braine, M. D. S., Brody, R. E., Brooks, P. J., Sudhalter, V., Ross, J., Catalano, L. & Fisch, S. M. (1990). Exploring language acquisition in children through the use of a miniature artificial language: Effects of item and pattern frequency, arbitrary subclasses, and correction. Journal of Memory and Language 29, 591–610.Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J., Braine, M. D. S., Catalano, L., Brody, R. E. & Sudhalter, V. (1993). Acquisition of gender-like noun subclasses in an artificial language: The contribution of phonological markers to learning. Journal of Memory and Language 32, 76–95.Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J., Kempe, V. & Sionov, A. (2006). The role of learner and input variables in learning inflectional morphology. Applied Psycholinguistics 27, 185–209.Google Scholar
Brooks, P. J., Tomasello, M., Dodson, K. & Lewis, L. (1999). Young children's overgeneralizations with fixed transitivity verbs. Child Development 70, 1325–37.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (eds) (2001). Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Christofidou, A. & Stephany, U. (1997). The early development of case forms in the speech of a Greek boy: A preliminary investigation. In Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, K. (ed.), Pre- and protomorphology in language acquisition. Papers and studies in contrastive linguistics, 33, 127–39. Poznan: Adam Mickiewicz University.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dabrowska, E. (2004). Rules or schemas? Evidence from Polish. Language and Cognitive Processes 19(2), 225–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dabrowska, E. (2006). Low-level schemas or productive rules: The role of diminutives in the acquisition of Polish case inflections. Language Sciences 28, 120–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dressler, W. (ed.) (1997). Studies in pre- and protomorphology. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.Google Scholar
Ellis, N. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24(2), 143–88.Google Scholar
Ellis, N. Faszination Tier & Natur. München: Meister Verlag GmbH, IMP B.V.Google Scholar
Gillis, S. (ed.) (1998). Studies in the acquisition of number and diminutive marking. Antwerp Papers in Linguistics, 95. Antwerp: Universiteit Anwerpen.Google Scholar
Haman, E. (2003). Early productivity in derivation: A case study of diminutives in the acquisition of Polish. Psychology of Language and Communication 7, 37–56.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, D. (1996). Universal tendencies in the semantics of the diminutive. Language 72, 533–78.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A functional approach to child language: A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kempe, V. & Brooks, P. J. (2001). The role of diminutives in Russian gender learning: Can child-directed speech facilitate the acquisition of inflectional morphology? Language Learning 51, 221–56.Google Scholar
Kempe, V., Brooks, P. J., Mironova, N. & Fedorova, O. (2003). Diminutivization supports gender acquisition in Russian children. Journal of Child Language 30, 471–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kempe, V., Brooks, P. J., Mironova, N., Pershukova, A. & Fedorova, O. (2007). Playing with word endings: Exploring effects of morphological variation in the learning of Russian noun inflections. British Journal of Developmental Psychology 25, 55–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kempe, V., Brooks, P. J. & Pirott, L. (2001). How can child-directed speech facilitate the acquisition of morphology? In Almgren, M., Barrena, A., Ezeizabarrena, M.-J., Idiazabal, I., & MacWhinney, B. (eds), Research on child language acquisition: Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Child Language, 1237–47. Medford, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Kempe, V., Ševa, N., Brooks, P. J., Mironova, N., Pershukova, A. & Fedorova, O. (in press). Elicited production of case-marking in Russian and Serbian children: Are diminutive nouns easier to inflict. First Language.Google Scholar
Mills, A. E. (1986). The acquisition of gender: A study of English and German. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. & Ullman, M. T. (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(11), 456–63.Google Scholar
Protassova, E. & Voeikova, M. D. (2007). Diminutives in Russian at the early stages of acquisition. In Savickienė, I. & Dressler, W. U. (eds), The acquisition of diminutives: A cross-linguistic perspective, 43–73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Rūķe-Draviņa, V. (1973). On the emergence of inflection in child language: A contribution based on Latvian speech data. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development, 252–67. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston Inc.Google Scholar
Savickienė, I. (1998). The acquisition of diminutives in Lithuanian. In Gillis, S. (ed.), Studies in the acquisition of number and diminutive marking. Antwerp Papers in Linguistics, 95, 115–35. Antwerp: Universiteit Anwerpen.Google Scholar
Savickienė, I. (2001). The role of diminutives in Lithuanian child language acquisition. Linguistica Baltica 9, 109–118.Google Scholar
Savickienė, I. (2002). The acquisition of gender. Kalbotyra 51(3), 133–43.Google Scholar
Savickienė, I. (2003). The acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.Google Scholar
Savickienė, I. & Dressler, W. U. (eds) (2007). The acquisition of diminutives: A cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Savickienė, I. & Kalėdaitė, V. (2007). The role of child's gender in language acquisition. Estonian papers in applied linguistics 3, 285–99.Google Scholar
Ševa, N., Kempe, V. & Brooks, P. J. (2006). Inducing low-level schema extraction with artificial suffixes. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2135–40. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ševa, N., Kempe, V., Brooks, P. J., Mironova, N., Pershukova, A. & Fedorova, O. (2007). Cross-linguistic evidence for the diminutive advantage: Gender agreement in Russian and Serbian children. Journal of Child Language 34, 111–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stump, G. T. (1998). Inflection. In Spencer, A. & Zwicky, A. M. (eds), The handbook of morphology, 13–43. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2001). The declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 30(1), 37–69.Google Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Pancheva, R., Love, T., Yee, E., Swinney, D. & Hickok, G. (2005). Neural correlates of lexicon and grammar: Evidence from the production, reading, and judgement of inflection in aphasia. Brain and Language 93(2), 185–238.Google Scholar
Wójcik, P. (1994). Some characteristics features of Lithuanian baby talk. Linguistica Baltica 3, 71–86.Google Scholar