Crosslinguistic evidence for the diminutive advantage: gender agreement in Russian and Serbian children

Abstract

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.

Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition? (A Systematic Review)

“…When hearing IDS in Chinese, English-speaking adults learned the target words only when the words were placed in the final position, and this was not when they were placed in a medial position [151]. Finally, the use of diminutives (a pervasive feature of CDS that is evident in many languages) facilitates word segmentation in adults hearing an unfamiliar language [152,153], and enhances gender categorization [154] and gender agreement even in languages that uses few diminutives [155]. …”

Cognitive Predictors of Generalization of Russian Grammatical Gender Categories

“…Having been trained on diminutives incurred an advantage in generalizing the gender categories to simplex nouns, as long as the items were transparently gender marked. Gender‐agreement elicitation studies have similarly demonstrated that Russian 2‐ to 4‐year‐old children tend to commit fewer agreement errors with diminutive nouns, both familiar and novel ones, than with their simplex counterparts (Kempe, Brooks, Mironova, & Fedorova, 2003; Kempe et al, 2007; Ševa et al, 2007). The same effect has been described for Serbian (Ševa et al, 2007) and Lithuanian (Savickiene, Kempe, & Brooks, 2009), both languages with quasi‐regular systems of gender marking in which diminutives create homogeneous noun clusters.…”

“…Gender‐agreement elicitation studies have similarly demonstrated that Russian 2‐ to 4‐year‐old children tend to commit fewer agreement errors with diminutive nouns, both familiar and novel ones, than with their simplex counterparts (Kempe, Brooks, Mironova, & Fedorova, 2003; Kempe et al, 2007; Ševa et al, 2007). The same effect has been described for Serbian (Ševa et al, 2007) and Lithuanian (Savickiene, Kempe, & Brooks, 2009), both languages with quasi‐regular systems of gender marking in which diminutives create homogeneous noun clusters. A diminutive advantage has also been observed in case‐marking elicitation studies with Russian (Kempe et al, 2009) and Polish speakers (Dabrowska, 2004, 2006), which is not surprising because noun gender categories organize the system of case‐marking declensions.…”

Prosodic disambiguation in child-directed speech

“…Moreover, there is evidence that some affective features of CDS can also facilitate language acquisition. For example, frequent use of diminutives to express endearment and affection has been shown to aid word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005;Kempe, Brooks, Gillis, & Samson, 2007) and acquisition of inflectional morphology in a number of languages Savickiene, Kempe, & Brooks, 2009;Ševa et al, 2007). Similarly, affective prosody may facilitate learning by capturing the child's attention.…”