Crosslinguistic evidence for the diminutive advantage: gender agreement in Russian and Serbian childrenThe Russian experiment was sponsored by NATO Collaborative Linkage Grant LST.CLG 978585 to Drs. Kempe, Mironova and Brooks. Portions of this work were presented at the Biennial conference of the Society for Research in Child Development, April 2005 and X International Congress for the Study of Child Language, July 2005.
ŠEVA, NADA; KEMPE, VERA; BROOKS, PATRICIA J.; MIRONOVA, NATALIJA; PERSHUKOVA, ANGELINA; FEDOROVA, OLGA; ŠEVA NADA; University of Belgrade; KEMPE VERA; University of Stirling; University of Stirling; BROOKS PATRICIA J.; University of New York; MIRONOVA NATALIJA; Moscow State University; PERSHUKOVA ANGELINA; Moscow State University; FEDOROVA OLGA; Moscow State University
Журнал:
Journal of Child Language
Дата:
2007
Аннотация:
Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10–4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their names, varying in derivational status (diminutive/simplex), novelty, and gender. Experiment 2 extends the gender-agreement elicitation methodology developed for Russian to Serbian, a language with similar morphosyntactic structure but considerably fewer diminutives in child-directed speech. Serbian children (N=22, mean age 3;8, range 3;0–4;1), exhibited an advantage for diminutive nouns of almost the same magnitude as the Russian children. The fact that the diminutive advantage was found in a language with a low frequency of diminutives in the input suggests that morphophonological homogeneity of word clusters and membership in dense neighbourhoods are important factors that contribute to the reduction of inflectional errors during language development.
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