engleski

The role of the class size in the acquisition of verbal morphology

The acquisition of inflectional morphology is a complex process that is often accompanied by overgeneralization. Children overgeneralize because they cannot cope with the complexity of the system they are confronted with. The phenomenon of overgeneralizations is still poorly understood in highly inflected languages. The factors influencing overgeneralizations may be interrelated and it is difficult to identify their respective contributions. One of the factors known to influence overgeneneralizations is class size. Class size is the number of verbs with phonologically similar word stems that carry the same corresponding inflectional morpheme. These clusters of verbs correspond to conjugation or inflectional classes. Patterns with many "class neighbours" are predicted to have lower error rates. Previous findings of class size effects at the level of inflectional morphology could in principle be disguised as effects of morphological complexity. The aim of this study was to test overgeneralizations of verbs with different class sizes, controlling for frequency and morphological complexity. Data were collected using a parental questionnaire. The participants were parents of Croatian monolingual children aged 2 ; 6 to 5 ; 11 years (N=96). The verbs included in the questionnaire were taken from the Croatian Corpus of Child Language. Each verb was assigned to a class based on its morphological properties. For each class, we calculated the class size in tokens based on the child-directed speech. We also calculated the complexity for each class, measured by the number of phonemes that are different in the two verb stems. The results showed a facilitating effect of class size on the acquisition of inflectional morphology - verbs with fewer class neighbours have a lower frequency of correct forms and a higher rate of overgeneralization. Using different methods, both in terms of parental questionnaire and measures of frequency and class size, similar trends to previous studies were observed. Our findings support theoretical approaches that emphasise the properties of input as the primary source of information for child language development.

verbal morphology ; language acquisition ; class size ; frequency ; morphological complexity ; Croatian

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