engleski

Verbal overgeneralizations in the acquisition of morphologically rich language: evidence from Croatian parents

In the course of acquiring verbal morphology, children develop certain rules based on forms they have already acquired and extend them to new forms. However, not all verb forms are predictable and cannot be produced simply by a general rule. There is evidence that children often overgeneralize. Overgeneralization consists of extending a regular pattern to an irregular form. For example, goed instead of went in English. These errors are a temporary side effect of the early stages of language acquisition and should disappear as children get older. There are two main factors that are considered to influence overgeneralization - token frequency and class size. Not many studies have closely examined the influence of these factors on overgeneralization, and some conflicting results have been found. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between overgeneralized forms and specific characteristics of the input. Participants were 92 parents of Croatian monolingual children aged 2 ; 6 to 5 ; 11 years, recruited through social media. We used the parental questionnaire in which parents were asked to estimate how often their child produced a particular form of the verb. We selected verbs with stem changes from six conjugation classes, controlling for all relevant characteristics (i.e., age of acquisition, frequency). Frequency and class size were calculated from two sources: child-directed speech in the Croatian Corpus of Child Language and the Croatian Web Corpus. The results showed that verbs that are less likely to be overgeneralized have a higher frequency and belong to larger classes, i.e., classes that are more frequent in the language surrounding children. Our novel method, in which data are collected from parents, shows similar trends to other studies (corpus-based or experimental), suggesting that children acquire morphological systems gradually in a way that is highly sensitive to the properties of the input. This supports theoretical approaches that emphasize input properties as the primary source of information for child language development.

verbal inflectional morphology ; language acquisition ; overgeneralizations ; parental questionnaire ; Croatian

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