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

Abstract

The purpose of current article is to describe the early phases of first language acquisition of nominal derivatives in morphology-rich Russian approaching an ideal inflecting-fusional language type. The results are based on the naturalistic longitudinal observations of two typically developing monolingual children (1;5–3;0) growing up in middle socio-economic status families (33 hours of recorded spontaneous speech). It has been revealed that derivation morphology, viz. affixation, starts to develop early and precedes compounding. Within nouns, suffixation is the main method of word-formation. Prefixation and mixed methods are rare. Although nouns can be formed from almost any grammatical classes, they are mainly formed from nouns in child speech. Early compounds can be described as right-headed endocentric ones where their main component is a noun or a verb. The preference for certain patterns and models rarely differs in child speech corpora. Both children have similar development of semantic categories and only a few innovations. The morpheme and semantic (cognitive) complexity of nominal derivatives in child speech increase by the end of the observation period. The influence of parental input is significant for the mechanisms of derivation morphology acquisition. This is confirmed by the presence of a positive correlation for both lemmas and tokens of nominal derivatives. The most frequent patterns in parental input are acquired by a child earlier.

Tvorba imenica u ranom jezičnom razvoju na temelju podataka za jedno dijete iz Hrvatskog korpusa dječjeg jezika

“…Tako je primjerice jedno dijete iz ruskog korpusa dječjeg jezika do dobi 2;8 proizvelo više od 50 sufi ksa u različitom značenju, od toga gotovo 30 za tvorbu imenica te 1 prefi ks (Kazakovskaya 2017). U govoru ruske djece uočava se da se izvođenje kao tvorbeni način pojavljuje ranije te puno češće od slaganja (Kazakovskaya 2017(Kazakovskaya , 2019Argus i Kazakovskaya 2018).…”

“…Ako se svaki sufi ks broji u svojemu značenju posebno, tada je broj proizvedenih sufi ksa još i veći. To se može činiti kao velik broj sufi ksa koji se uočavaju u govoru djeteta do njegove treće godine, ali slično se uočava i u ruskom korpusu u kojem je zabilježeno dvadeset i osam sufi ksa za tvorbu imenica (Kazakovskaya 2019 Od svih sufi ksa uvjerljivo najzastupljeniji je sufi ks -ica kojim se tvore umanjenice od imenica ženskog roda i ženske osobe. U ovome korpusu tim su sufi ksom tvorene samo dvije imenice za ženske osobe, a u svim drugim primjerima radi se o umanjenicama.…”

Acquisition of diminutives in typologically different languages: Evidence from Russian and Estonian

“…That is, Liza's input contains many diminutives, and there are many diminutives in the girl's speech, and, in contrast, Kirill's input is not as rich in diminutives and there are few diminutives in his speech. However, a strong positive correlation has been revealed between the frequency of the semantic categories of nominal derivatives in CDS and CS based on the data of the two Russian boys (one of them being Kirill) and their caregivers (more details in Kazakovskaya 2019, Kazakovskaya, Voeikova 2021. The most frequent categories (according to their percentage of lemmas/tokens among derived nouns) for both adult-child dyads are diminutives, activities and/or their results, instruments, and agents.…”