engleski

(Morpho)phonology and the acquisition of early lexicon

BACKGROUND. This study tackles the importance of (morpho)phonological factors on the acquisition of early child lexicon in Croatian. Many studies emphasized neighborhood density as the decisive factor in the acquisition of early lexicon and have found it both facilitating and inhibitory. Phonological density has also received much attention recently attempting to explain lexical growth in toddlers. Here, following, we study preferability of consonant cluster combination in the early lexicon in terms of Net Auditory Distance (NAD) taking into account manner and place of articulation as well as sonority of each consonant. Although related to the mentioned measures, the preferability of the clusters in various positions within the word represents a measure sensitive to morphological complexity, which is important in a morphologically rich language such as Croatian. METHOD. We constrained the analysis of child language corpora of three Croatian children available in CHILDES database to medial CV, CCV and CCCV clusters in word types thus including the morphological markers into the analysis. The developmental changes are observed, i.e. lexical data extracted from the corpora are grouped according to the children’s age. The results of NAD calculations are compared with neighborhood density and phonotactic probability measures. RESULTS. The results indicate that the early lexicon comprises of more preferable clusters in medial positions. The unpreferable combinations are more frequent where morphological boundary can be found, both in prefixation and suffixation. CONCLUSION. Similarly to neighbourhood density studies, these results can be interpreted in terms of phonological details available for word learning and recognition, but also in terms of the sensitivity for detecting morphological markers.

Morphonotactics ; Medial consonant clusters ; Early lexicon ; Croatian language

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