Early morphological productivity in Hungarian: evidence from sentence repetition and elicited production

Abstract

This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task). Results suggest that Hungarian nominal and verbal suffixes can be used productively before the age of three. Children showed greater productivity with nominal than with verbal suffixes, and no productivity with novel suffixes; greater input variability facilitated productive use. These findings confirm that although morphological productivity is an early achievement, it is a gradual process influenced by several characteristics (e.g. syntactic category and variability) of the input. They also confirm that the new method is an effective way of testing morphological knowledge even at younger ages where other ways of eliciting grammatical knowledge often fail.

A Sentence Repetition Task for Early Language Assessment in Spanish

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The role of language production mechanisms in children's sentence repetition: Evidence from an inflectionally rich language

“…The task, however, involves more than just retrieving an episodic, form-based representation of the sentence. Performance on sentence repetition shows a stable and significant relationship with language and literacy measures over time (English: Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervag, & Snowling, 2015; Norwegian: Klem et al, 2014), and it reliably reflects properties of early morphology and syntax in typically developing children (e.g., Devescovi & Caselli, 2007; Gábor & Lukács, 2012; Polišenská, Chiat, & Roy, 2015). Furthermore, the difficulty in repeating sentences with more complex syntactic structures is not fully accounted for by differences in the length of the sentences, assumed to tax working memory (e.g., Moll, Hulme, Nag, & Snowling, 2013).…”

A magyar morfológia elsajátításának kezdetei

“…Felmerül a kérdés, hogyan sajátítják el a magyar anyanyelvű gyermekek a magyar alaktan komplex rendszerét. A 20. század végén számos kísérletes és korpuszvizsgálatot végeztek tipikusan fejlődő óvodáskorú magyar gyerekekkel a morfológia elsajátításának megértésére (MacWhinney 1975;MacWhinney-Pléh-Bates 1985;Lukács-Racsmány-Pléh 2001;Pléh-Palotás-Lőrik 2002;Pléh-Lukács-Racsmány 2003;Gábor-Lukács 2012), újabban pedig nyelvfejlődési és egyéb zavarokkal küzdő gyermek alaktani tudását is vizsgálták (pl. Lukács-Leonard-Kas 2010).…”