Our previous research showed that Russian children commit fewer gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns than with their simplex counterparts. Experiment 1 replicates this finding with Russian children (N=24, mean 3;7, range 2;10–4;6). Gender agreement was recorded from adjective usage as children described animal pictures given just their names, varying in derivational status (diminutive/simplex), novelty, and gender. Experiment 2 extends the gender-agreement elicitation methodology developed for Russian to Serbian, a language with similar morphosyntactic structure but considerably fewer diminutives in child-directed speech. Serbian children (N=22, mean age 3;8, range 3;0–4;1), exhibited an advantage for diminutive nouns of almost the same magnitude as the Russian children. The fact that the diminutive advantage was found in a language with a low frequency of diminutives in the input suggests that morphophonological homogeneity of word clusters and membership in dense neighbourhoods are important factors that contribute to the reduction of inflectional errors during language development.
RUNNING HEAD: Cross--linguistic analyses of stress assignment 2
Cross-linguistic evidence for probabilistic orthographic cues to lexical stressMost of what we know about the process of converting orthography to phonology during reading aloud is based on data from monosyllabic words. Moreover, much of the research in this area is based on reading aloud in English. There has been increasing interest in the mechanisms underpinning the reading aloud of polysyllables. In many languages monosyllabic words represent a small proportion of the whole vocabulary, and so restriction to these items may mean that the model is not representative of the reading system -monosyllabic words may be a special case. For instance, in English though single syllable words account for 70.9% of tokens in the CELEX corpus (Baayen, Pipenbrock, & Gulikers, 1993) they only account for 15.5% of the word types. In other languages, the imbalance is even greater, for the Dutch CELEX database, monosyllables account for 63.3% and 7.9% of tokens and types, respectively, but for the German CELEX database, monosyllables account for 50.8% of tokens but only 3.8% of types.However, if models of reading can apply to bisyllabic and trisyllabic words as well, then this increases the coverage of the whole language in English up to 96.8% of tokens and 82.4% of types. For German and Dutch, the coverage is 91.9% and 94.4% for tokens, and 55.8% and 61.1% for types, respectively.A comprehensive understanding of word naming must thus include knowledge of how both monosyllabic and polysyllabic words are read aloud -and knowledge of how this process operates in distinct languages, otherwise, as in the case of German, models of reading based on monosyllables apply effectively to only 1 in 26 words. There are substantial challenges that are introduced when one considers naming of polysyllables.
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