engleski

The role of the child-directed speech in the acquisition of reflexive constructions in the Croatian language

Studies on the acquisition of reflexive constructions (RC) have shown that children produce intransitive reflexive constructions (IRC) in higher proportion than the transitive reflexive constructions (TRC) during the acquisition. Formal approaches explain this pattern by the simple argument structure of the IRC (e.g., Babyonyshev et al. 2001). The functionalist perspective views the frequency of the construction subtype in the child- directed speech (CDS) as crucial factor (e.g., Braine and Brooks 1995). Goldberg and co- authors (e.g., Boyd and Goldberg 2009) state that the acquisition of the construction subtype is enhanced by the presence of highly frequent verbs in that subtype in CDS. This study examines three possible predicting factors of the RC acquisition: (1) the construction type, (2) CDS and (3) the most frequent verbs in RC. Method. The data have been extracted from the Croatian Corpus of Child Language which contains the spontaneous linguistic production of three children aged 1 ; 2-3 ; 2. RCs were extracted using the CLAN software (1067 in child language (CL), 2135 in CDS) and analysed. Results. (1) IRC constructions are the most frequent RCs in CL and in CDS (above 80%). (2) The RCs (%) in CDS predicts the RCs (%) in CL (F(1, 53)=13.086, p=.001, R2=.198, Beta=.445) and errors (%) (F(1, 51)=9.375, p=.004, R2=.155, Beta=-.394), but only IRC (%) in CL increases with age. The IRC (%) in CDS predicts the RC (%) in CL and errors in (%) CL ; the opposite is true for the TRC (%) in CDS. (3) The two most frequent RCs in CDS are both IRC and predict the number (F(53)=57.431, p=.000, R2=.52, Beta=.721) and the percentage of RC in CL (F(53)=4.859, p=.032, R2=.084, Beta=.290) as well as the errors (%) (F(51)=4.051, p=.05, R2=.072, Beta=.269). Conclusion. The results suggest that the structure of the CDS predicts the acquisition pattern for RC in Croatian.

language acuisition, reflexive constructions, child-directed speech

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