The roles of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density in the acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology

Abstract

A B S T R A C TFour-and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun. Second, the error patterns were not compatible with the systematic substitution of target forms by either (a) the most frequent form of that noun or (b) a single morphosyntactic default form, as might be predicted by naive versions of a constructivist and generativist account, respectively. Rather, most errors reflected near-miss substitutions of singular for plural, masculine for feminine, or nominative/accusative for a less frequent case. Together, these findings provide support for an

Cognitive and linguistic biases in morphology learning

“…Second, a theory of morphology learning based solely on frequency would predict that when a child produces an incorrect form, that the child substitutes the correct form with the most frequent form. However, several studies have shown that errors are often "near misses," the closest known phonological or conceptual form, not the most frequent form (Krajewski, Theakston, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2011;Leonard, Caselli, & Devescovi, 2002;Saviciute, Ambridge, & Pine, 2018). The tendency for errors to closely approximate known alternatives supports the hypothesis that learners make use of accessibility in learning and generalizing a morphological system.…”

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

“…We should therefore not be surprised to learn that studies of both verb and noun morphology (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015; Dąbrowska, 2004, 2008; Dąbrowska & Szczerbinski, 2006; Engelmann et al, 2019; Granlund et al, 2019; Kirjavainen, Nikolaev, & Kidd, 2012; Kjærbæk, dePont Christensen, & Basbøll, 2014; Krajewski, Theakston, Lieven, & Tomasello, 2011; Kunnari et al, 2011; Leonard, Caselli, & Devescovi, 2002; Maratsos, 2000; Maslen et al, 2004; Räsänen et al, 2016; Rubino & Pine, 1998; Saviciute, Ambridge, & Pine, 2018) yield three findings that constitute evidence for an exemplar (or connectionist) account. The first is an effect of phonological neighbourhood density: the greater the number of phonological ‘friends’ or ‘neighbours’ – forms that are phonologically similar to the target and that take the same inflectional ending – the greater the rate at which children produce the target form correctly, and the lower the error rate.…”

Phonological neighborhood measures and multisyllabic word acquisition in children

“…In inflectional languages, the effect of neighborhood density in multisyllabic acquisition was found to largely mirror that for CVC words. Children were more likely to correctly inflect multisyllabic words with greater neighborhood density during past tense verb inflection (Kirjavainen, Nikolaev & Kidd, 2012;Ragnarsdóttir, Simonsen & Plunkett, 1999), noun inflection (Granlund et al, 2019;Savičiute, Ambridge & Pine, 2018), and case inflection (Da̧browska & Szczerbiński, 2006). However, these studies examine the process of acquiring word inflections through a different theoretical lens, e.g., rule-based or analogy-based approaches to inflectional morphology (Granlund et al, 2019).…”