Polish children's productivity with case marking: the role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity

Dabrowska, Ewa and Szczerbinski, Marcin (2006) Polish children's productivity with case marking: the role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity. Journal of Child Language, 33 (03). p. 559. ISSN 0305-0009

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000906007471

Abstract

Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from dative neuter; and the overall performance of the four-year-olds was very similar to that of adults. All age groups were more productive with inflections that apply to large and/or phonologically diverse classes, although class size and token frequency appeared to be more important for younger children (two- and three-year-olds) and phonological diversity for older children and adults. Regularity, on the other hand, was a very poor predictor of productivity. The results support usage-based models of language acquisition and are problematic for the dual mechanism model.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: Q100 Linguistics
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Social Sciences
Depositing User: Ellen Cole
Date Deposited: 20 Jan 2012 09:10
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2023 12:19
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5053

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