Acquisition of Finnish derivational morphology: School-age children and young adults

Abstract

The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures. However, this development could be delayed because of the complex derivational morphology in Finnish. To assess this, three age groups of Finnish native speakers participated in a priming study, in which they made a visual lexical decision for the target words. There were three types of primes: morphologically related words, pseudowords, and unrelated words. The reaction times results showed a significant difference between all the groups, which implies that the word processing is still developing in adolescence. The error rates unveiled a similar pattern to reaction times. The prime type affected the recognition: words with morphological primes were processed faster than words with pseudoword primes, which in turn were processed faster than words with unrelated primes. Moreover, males made significantly more errors than females with morphological and pseudoword prime conditions.

App-based morphological training produces lasting effects on word knowledge in primary school children: A randomized controlled trial.

“…Despite differences across languages in the complexity of the inflectional system, most principles governing inflections and compounding are acquired by the early primary school years (Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Owen Van Horne, 2019). The acquisition of derivations, in contrast, lasts well into adolescence and adulthood (Nippold & Sun, 2008; Vainio et al, 2019). Derivations are especially important for advanced vocabulary and reading comprehension because they are core building blocks of academic language (Nagy & Townsend, 2012).…”

Child nominal derivation and parental input: Evidence from morphology-rich Russian

“…occasionalistic novel derivatives) that he identifies as "formations by analogy" (ibid). Our knowledge of the cognitive bases of regular derivational morphology is based on a few experiments with older children (e.g., Jurjeva 2006 for Russian, Vainio et al 2018 for Finnish which is also a synthetic language, rich both in derivation and inflection). This determines the purpose of the current work: the study of derivational processes in the sphere of nouns in the early stages of speech ontogenesis.…”