Croatian (mor)phonotactic word-medial consonant clusters in the early lexicon
-
Maja Kelić
,
Ana Matić Škorić
and
Marijan Palmović
Abstract
This study investigates the emergence of (mor)phonological consonant clusters in L1 acquisition. Following the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis (SMH), distribution and preferability of word-medial consonant clusters in the corpus of three children acquiring Croatian were explored. VCCV and VCCCV clusters were extracted from the Croatian Corpus of Child Language. Subsequently, all word-medial clusters were tagged as exclusively phonotactic, exclusively morphonotactic, and ones that occurred in both contexts. The results partially corroborated SMH, strengthening the premise that morphological richness of a language moderates the interaction between morphology and phonology in early language acquisition. The data showed a clear predominance of morphonotactic clusters in one out of three subcorpus. Developmentally, an increase in all three cluster types was observed and generally all clusters were predominantly less preferred. Early emerging phonotactic clusters appeared to be mostly preferred, while the first morphonotactic clusters comprised less preferred combinations, with a gradual increase in preferability. Individual differences in cluster distribution and preferability blurred the role of the importance of morphonotactic information in L1 acquisition, suggesting that children employ different paths to acquire a language, but also suggesting that further exploration of this hypothesis in different languages and using different approaches is needed.
Funding source: This study was carried out within the international project “Crosslinguistic project on pre- and protomorphology in language acquisition” (PI professor Wolfgang U. Dressler, University of Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
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Research funding: This study was carried out within the international project “Crosslinguistic project on pre- and protomorphology in language acquisition” (PI professor Wolfgang U. Dressler, University of Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences).
Graphical representation of the distribution of all clusters according to the age of their appearance in the subcorpora of three children (ANT, VJE, MAR).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Production of vowel reduction by Jordanian–Arabic speakers of English: an acoustic study
- The linguistic realization of focus in Uyghur: can the two focusing strategies be used interchangeably?
- Thematic role mappings in metaphor variation: contrasting English bake and Spanish hornear
- A probability distribution of dependencies in interlanguage
- Croatian (mor)phonotactic word-medial consonant clusters in the early lexicon
- The impact of gestural representation of metaphor schema on metaphor comprehension
- Licensing Case-mismatches and dependent plural markers in Korean left-node-raising
- Mandarin Chinese peer advice online: a study of gender disparity
- The pragmatics of ‘it is well’ in Nigerian English
- Active verbs with inanimate, text-denoting subjects in Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics
- Book Reviews
- Book review. Melissa Yoong. 2020. Professional discourses, gender and identity in women’s media. Springer Nature Switzerland. 149pp. 49.99€, ISBN 978-3-030-55543-6.
- The status, roles, and dynamics of Englishes in Asia
