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Elicited production of case-marking in Russian and Serbian children: Are diminutive nouns easier to inflect?

University of Abertay, Dundee, v.kempe{at}abertay.ac.uk

Nada eva

University of York

Patricia J. Brooks

College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of City University of New York

Natalija Mironova

Moscow State University

Angelina Pershukova

Moscow State University

Olga Fedorova

Moscow State University

Two experiments used an elicited speech-production paradigm to explore children's acquisition of noun case-marking inflections. Russian (N = 24, 2;10— 4;6 years) and Serbian children (N = 24, 2;10—4;11) were asked to produce prepositional phrases requiring genitive or dative inflections of masculine and feminine, familiar and novel, simplex (vaza [Ru/Se: vase]) and diminutive (Ru: vazochka, Se: vazica) nouns. Across languages, children produced fewer case-marking errors with familiar compared to novel nouns, and diminutive compared to simplex nouns. The diminutive advantage occurred despite a markedly lower frequency of diminutive usage in Serbian than Russian child-directed speech. This suggests that in acquiring richly inflected languages, children most readily construct low-level generalizations of inflectional changes applying to morpho-phonologically homogeneous clusters of words like diminutives.

Key Words: Case-marking • child-directed speech • diminutives • Russian • Serbian

First Language, Vol. 29, No. 2, 147-165 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0142723708092441


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