engleski

Acquisition of overabundance: some preliminary results from a cross-linguistic experiment

It is well known that words that share morphological features support pattern formation and grammatical generalisation, thus promoting productivity. However, given the variability of input, children often overgeneralise. Sometimes they also produce overgeneralised and adult-like forms in parallel. Since more than one form per cell is attested in child language, overgeneralisation is similar to overabundance in adult language, a phenomenon in which morphological paradigm cells can be realised by more than a single lexical form. To date, no studies have been conducted to investigate how grammatical categories with overabundant cells in the input are acquired. In the present study, we investigate how children acquire inflectional systems with morphological overabundance. Four- to six-year-old children acquiring either Croatian or Estonian, two morphologically rich languages with abundant overabundance, were tested on noun forms with and without overabundance in the target language to investigate how they navigate the parallel forms and to what extent they overgeneralise with nouns which do not exhibit overabundance in adult language use. In this talk, we will present the preliminary results of the experiment conducted in Croatian and Estonian.

Morphological overabundance ; Language acquisition ; Cross-linguistic experiment ; Croatian ; Estonian

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