engleski

Methods for assessing overgeneralised forms in child language: from corpus and lexical databases to parental questionnaire

During language acquisition children are faced with the difficult task of acquiring inflectional morphology, leading to the production of different erroneous forms, among which is overextending a certain rule to irregular words (e.g., bring to bringed instead of brought in English). Overgeneralized forms reflect the complexity of the morphological system and indicate strategies children employ when facing it. They are often used interchangeably with adult-like forms (Pinker 1984). There is an ongoing debate about mechanisms underlying the production of overgeneralized forms (Ambridge et al. 2012). Dual route models posit dual mechanisms: a formal regular rule capable of operating on any verb, and a similarity-based inventory of irregulars (Prasada & Pinker 1993). Single route models posit a single mechanism for both regular and irregular forms: the generalizations in children's use of inflected forms follow from the formation of patterns between all existing forms in the input (Elman et al. 1996). Studies on verbal overgeneralization often focus on languages with low morphological complexity (e.g., English: Ambridge 2010). The Croatian conjugational system displays different degrees of complexity, and that complexity is not primarily based on the number of inflectional morphemes, but rather on an elaborate system of stem changes (Bošnjak Botica & Hržica 2016). During the early language development, children face a challenging task of acquiring that system, presumably by using overgeneralized forms to overcome its complexity. We aim to test the production of overgeneralized verb forms in preschool children, using the parental questionnaire in which parents report overgeneralizations of their children. We hypothesize that parents will report overgeneralized verbs in all verb classes in which the stem changes, but that the frequency of overgeneralizations will depend on the features of the input, i.e. it will be predicted by the frequency of verbs (higher rate of overgeneralizations for infrequent verbs) and phonological neighbourhood density (higher rate of overgeneralizations for verbs with fewer phonological neighbours). Up to now, studies have used a corpus-based method to retrieve overgeneralizations in child language (Maslen et al. 2004), which has limited success in capturing this phenomenon. Due to the low density of language sampling, low-frequency phenomena such as overgeneralizations tend to be underrepresented (Maratsos 2000). A parental questionnaire will provide more precise information. The items selected for the questionnaire are the verbs used by parents in the longitudinal Croatian Corpus of Child Language (Kovačević 2008). First, all verbs from child-directed speech were extracted (N=1352). Then, verbs with stem change were selected (N=397). They were divided into different classes according to Jelaska and Bošnjak Botica (2019). For each verb class phonological neighbourhood density, frequency in the child language corpus, subjective frequency and age of acquisition were reported (last two retrieved from Croatian lexical databases – Kuvač Kraljević & Olujić 2018 ; Peti-Stantić et al. 2018). Only verbs with the age of acquisition up to 5 were selected. Finally, all prefixed verbs were removed. The final questionnaire consists of 50 verbs with the average age of acquisition 3 ; 4, average subjective frequency 3.94 and average corpus frequency 20.

acquisition of morphology, overgeneralizations, Croatian, corpus method, lexical databases

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