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Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input
Price-Williams, David Davies, Matt
Price-Williams, David
Davies, Matt
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2022-10-01
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Abstract
Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for inputbased language acquisition theories. Two
analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children’s (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents’ use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child’s use of inflectional affixes and their lexical restrictedness was compared with their father’s equalised sample. Second, the children’s spontaneous case-marking errors were analysed in context and measured against type and token frequencies in both parents’ data and the child-directed speech (CDS) corpus. Findings in both analyses accord with constructivist theory: near adult-like knowledge of Polish inflections hiding a range of use that is more lexically restricted than in their caregivers’ speech; low error rates hiding much higher ‘pockets of ignorance’ for specific inflectional contexts; and patterns of error that correspond closely to token/type frequencies in the CDS, though with the older sibling making some errors that were not frequency-based. Potential effects of syncretism, case ambiguity and semantics are also discussed.
Citation
Price-Williams, D., & Davies, M. (2022). Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input. First Language, 43(1), 112–134. https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237221123695
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SAGE Publications
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First Language
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Article
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Price-Williams, D., & Davies, M., Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input, First Language (Journal Volume Number 43 and Issue Number 1) pp. 112–134. Copyright © [2022] (The Authors). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.
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0142-7237
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1740-2344