Abstract
In the current paper, we examine the degree to which a 2-year-old Polishspeaking child exhibits productivity in her use of noun morphology. Using densely collected naturalistic data (five recording sessions per week) we assess the range of noun inflections she produces, the degree of productivity in her use of individual nouns, and the contextual productivity in her use of individual inflections. We adopt careful controls to allow comparison between the child’s noun use and that of her caregiver. Our data show that although the child uses the same range of noun inflections as her mother, she shows a much more limited productivity in her use of both individual nouns and individual inflections with respect to their contexts of use. We discuss the results in the light of two different theoretical approaches to inflectional morphology: the usage-based, schema approach and the rule-based approach.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abbot-Smith K., Behrens H. (2006) How known constructions influence the acquisition of other constructions: The German passive and future constructions. Cognitive Science 30(6): 995–1026
Aguado-Orea, J. (2004). The acquisition of morpho-syntax in Spanish: Implications for current theories of development. Unpublished PhD, The University of Nottingham.
Berman R.A. (2004) Between emergence and mastery: The long developmental route of language acquisition. In: Berman R.A. (ed) Language development across childhood and adolescence. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 9–34
Burgess C., Lund K. (1997) Modelling parsing constraints with high-dimensional context space. Language and Cognitive Processes 12(2/3): 177–210
Bybee J.L. (1985) Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. John Benjamins, Amsterdam
Bybee J.L. (1995) Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10(5): 425–455
Cameron-Faulkner T., Lieven E.V.M., Theakston A.L. (2007) What part of no do children not understand? A usage-based account of multiword negation. Journal of Child Language 34(2): 251–282
Chomsky N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Croft W. (2001) Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Dąbrowska E. (1997) Cognitive semantics and the Polish dative. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
Dąbrowska E. (2001) Learning a morphological system without a default: The Polish genitive. Journal of Child Language 28(3): 545–574
Dąbrowska E. (2004) Rules or schemas? Evidence from Polish. Language and Cognitive Processes 19(2): 225–271
Dąbrowska E. (2005) Productivity and beyond: Mastering the Polish genitive inflection. Journal of Child Language 32(1): 191–205
Dąbrowska E. (2006) Low-level schemas or general rules? The role of diminutives in the acquisition of Polish case inflections. Language Sciences 28(1): 120–135
Dąbrowska E. (2008) The effects of frequency and neighbourhood density on adult speakers’ productivity with Polish case inflections: An empirical test of usage-based approaches to morphology. Journal of Memory and Language 58(4): 931–951
Dąbrowska E., Lieven E.V.M. (2005) Towards a lexically specific grammar of children’s question constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16(3): 437–474
Dąbrowska E., Szczerbiński M. (2006) Polish children’s productivity with case marking: The role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity. Journal of Child Language 33(3): 559–597
Dressler W.U. (1999) Why collapse morphological concepts?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(6): 1021–1021
Dressler, W. U., Drążyk, R., Drążyk, D., Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, K., & Jagła, E. (1996). On the earliest stages of acquisition of Polish declension. In C. Koster & F. Wijnen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Groningen Assembly on language acquisition (pp. 185–195). Groningen: Centre for Language and Cognition.
Dressler W.U., Dziubalska-Kołaczyk K., Fabiszak M. (1997) Polish inflection classes within natural morphology. Bulletin de la Société Polonaise de Linguistique 53: 95–119
Field A. (2005) Discovering statistics using SPSS (2nd ed.). SAGE, London
Goldberg A.E. (2005) Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Howell D.C. (2007) Statistical methods for psychology (6th ed.). Thomson/Wadsworth, Belmont, CA
Kirjavainen M., Theakston A.L., Lieven E.V.M. (2009a) Can input explain children’s me-for-I errors?. Journal of Child Language 36(5): 1091–1114
Kirjavainen M., Theakston A.L., Lieven E.V.M., Tomasello M. (2009) ‘I want hold Postman Pat’: An investigation into the acquisition of infinitival marker ‘to’. First Language 29(3): 313–339
Köpcke K.-M. (1998) The acquisition of plural marking in English and German revisited: schemata versus rules. Journal of Child Language 25(2): 293–319
Kovačević, M., Palmović, M., & Hržca, G. (2009). The acquisition of case, number and gender in Croatian. In U. Stephany & M. D. Voeikova (Eds.), Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: A cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 153–177). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krajewski, G. (2005). The role of grammatical gender in the acquisition of noun inflection in Polish. Psychology of Language and Communication, 9(1).
Krajewski, G., Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., & Tomasello, M. (in press). How Polish children switch from one case to another when using novel nouns: Challenges for current models of inflectional morphology. Language and Cognitive Processes.
Landauer T.K., Dumais S.T. (1997) A solution to Plato’s problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review 104(2): 211–240
Lieven E.V.M., Behrens H., Speares J., Tomasello M. (2003) Early syntactic creativity: a usagebased approach. Journal of Child Language 30(2): 333–367
MacKay D.J.C. (2003) Information theory, inference and learning algorithms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
MacWhinney B. (2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ
Marchman V.A. (1997) Children’s productivity in the English past tense: The role of frequency, phonology, and neighborhood structure. Cognitive Science 21(3): 283–304
Maslen R.J., Theakston A.L., Lieven E.V.M., Tomasello M. (2004) A dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregularization in English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47(6): 1319–1333
Matthews D.E., Theakston A.L. (2006) Errors of omission in English-speaking children’s production of plurals and the past tense: The effects of frequency, phonology, and competition. Cognitive Science 30(6): 1027–1052
McDonald S.A., Shillcock R.C. (2001) Rethinking the word frequency effect: The neglected role of distributional information in lexical processing. Language and Speech 44(3): 295–323
Mueller Gathercole V.C., Sebastián E., Soto P. (2002) The emergence of linguistic person in Spanish-speaking children. Language Learning 52(4): 679–722
Pine J.M., Lieven E.V.M., Rowland C.F. (1998) Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category. Linguistics 36(4): 807–830
Pinker S. (1997) How the mind works. Penguin, London
Pinker S., Ullman M.T. (2002) The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(11): 456–463
Pizzuto E., Caselli M.C. (1992) The acquisition of Italian morphology: Implications for models of language development. Journal of Child Language 19(3): 491–557
Ravid D. (2004) Derivational morphology revisited: Later lexical development in Hebrew. In: Berman R.A. (ed) Language development across childhood and adolescence. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 53–82
Ravid D., Dressler W.U., Nir-Sagiv B., Korecky-Kröll K., Souman A., Rehfeldt K., Laaha S., Bertl J., Basboell H., Gillis S. (2008) Core morphology in child directed speech: Crosslinguistic corpus analyses of noun plurals. In: Behrens H. (ed) Corpora in language acquisition research: History, methods, perspectives. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 25–60
Ravid D., Farah R. (2009) Noun plurals in early Palestinian Arabic: a longitudinal case study. In: Stephany U., Voeikova M.D. (eds) Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: a cross-linguistic perspective. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 411–432
Rubino R.B., Pine J.M. (1998) Subject-verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: What low error rates hide. Journal of Child Language 25(1): 35–59
Shannon C.E. (1948) A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell Systems Technical Journal 27: 379–423
Smoczyńska, M. (1985). The acquisition of Polish. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition (Vol. 1: The data, pp. 595–686). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Stephany, U., Voeikova, M.D. (eds) (2009) Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: A cross-linguisitic perspective. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
Theakston A.L., Lieven E.V.M. (2008) The influence of discourse context on children’s provision of auxiliary BE. Journal of Child Language 35(1): 129–158
Tomasello M. (2003) Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Tomasello M., Stahl D. (2004) Sampling children’s spontaneous speech: How much is enough?. Journal of Child Language 31(1): 101–121
Vargha A., Delaney H.D. (2000) A critique and improvement of the CL Common Language effect size statistics of McGraw and Wong. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 25(2): 101–132
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Krajewski, G., Lieven, E.V.M. & Theakston, A.L. Productivity of a Polish child’s inflectional noun morphology: a naturalistic study. Morphology 22, 9–34 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-011-9199-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-011-9199-0