engleski

Acquisition of Croatian morphonotactics

Morphonotactics as interplay between morphotactics and phonotactics (Dressler and Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006) plays an important role in the acquisition of phonology and lexicon. Strong Morphonotactics Hypothesis (SMH) states that the interaction of morphology with phonotactics facilitates both processing and acquisition, but this might be restricted to systems of rich morphology (Sommer–Lolei et al., 2019). Thus, SMH needs to be investigated further. In this study we examined early medial cluster combinations in Croatian aiming to explore which clusters result from the intervention of morphology, which are purely phonotactic, and how this impacts language acquisition. We observed the characteristics of consonant clusters in relation to the phase of a child’s morphological development and we related the psycholinguistic (L1 acquisition) data to linguistically-based measures (NAD). For this study, we examined longitudinal corpora of one child from Zagreb (ANT, 1 ; 10 – 2 ; 08). All double and triple word-medial consonant clusters in CS were extracted and classified as morphonotactic or phonotactic. Preliminary results show a rise in the number of clusters, but no clear preference for morphonotactic clusters, nor its relation to the different morphological stages in ANT’s language development. The results were discussed bearing in mind the nature of medial morphonotactic clusters, which in Croatian arise mainly through derivation and very rarely through inflection. These preliminary results offer important methodological implications for further research of data available in Croatian Child Corpus.

Morphonotactics ; Strong Morphonotactics Hypothesis ; Early lexicon ; Acquisition ; Croatian

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