Katharina Korecky-Kröll

On the role of morphological richness in the early development of noun and verb inflection

This study proposes a new methodology for determining the relationship between child-directed speech and child speech in early acquisition. It illustrates the use of this methodology in investigating the relationship between the morphological richness of child-directed speech and the speed of morphological development in child speech. Both variables are defined in terms of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and estimated in a set of longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of nine children and their caretakers. The children are aged 1;3–3;0, acquiring nine different languages that vary in terms of morphological richness. The main result is that the degree of morphological richness in child-directed speech is positively related to the speed of development of noun and verb paradigms in child speech.

Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default?

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e + U, -er + U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.

A comparative and dynamic approach to the development of determiner use in three children acquiring different languages

The study investigates the development of determiner use in three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch, from the onset of language until age 3;0. Noun constructions (determiner omission, correct bare nouns, filler and determiner uses) in the children and in their inputs are analysed, providing evidence of similarities in developmental shape as well as differences in frequencies and timing. As expected, determiner use was delayed in the Germanic languages as compared to French. Differences between the Austrian and the Dutch child were explained by language properties and by child characteristics. Modelling dynamic input–output relations provided evidence of styles of long-term parental adaptation (accommodation for the French and complementarity for the Dutch and Austrian children).

The role of (explicit) contrast in adjective acquisition: A cross-linguistic longitudinal study of adjective production in spontaneous child speech and parental input.

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age.

Prosody and animacy in the development of noun determiner use: A cross- linguistic approach

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic–Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns for taking a determiner or filler was found in French, but not in Austrian German or Dutch. The authors discuss the possible contributory role of these factors on determiner acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective, also accounting for more specific differences between Austrian German and Dutch.

Vocabulary as a Central Link between Phonological Working Memory and Narrative Competence: Evidence from Monolingual and Bilingual Four-Year-Olds from Different Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Phonological working memory capacity, vocabulary size, and narrative competence are important skills in children’s L1 and L2 acquisition, which may vary as a function of their language background and socioeconomic status (SES). We investigated test data of 56 typically developing 4-year-old kindergarten children from two SES and two language backgrounds: 29 children (15 higher SES, 14 lower SES) were monolingual German-speaking, and 27 children (14 higher SES, 13 lower SES) were successive Turkish–German bilinguals. The tests comprised a non-word repetition task testing phonological working memory, receptive vocabulary tests (in L1 and L2), and a narrative task. We investigated the effects of SES and language background on children’s test performance. Results indicate that SES was a highly significant factor for phonological working memory and vocabulary in the monolingual children, but not in the bilingual children. Although the items of the non-word repetition task followed German phonotactic structure, lower SES (LSES) L2 children did not differ significantly from their monolingual LSES peers, demonstrating that there was no bilingual working memory disadvantage in the LSES group. A significant effect of language background was found for German vocabulary and for all categories of narrative competence, but only two slight SES effects on narrative competence. Significant correlations were found between phonological working memory and vocabulary as well as between vocabulary and narrative competence, but not between phonological working memory and narrative competence. Results suggest that phonological working memory and narrative competence are different domains of language awareness, and that vocabulary may act as the central variable mediating between them.

Scaling morphosemantic transparency/opacity: A corpus-linguistic and acquisitionist study of German diminutives

Abstract The judicious use of electronic corpora allows new possibilities in the study of word formation. In contrast to the usual way of contrasting morphosemantic transparency (or compositionality) and morphosemantic opacity (or non-compositionality) in a dichotomous way, we present a ten-step scale from maximum transparency to total opacity, exemplified with the common German diminutive suffixation in -chen and Austro-Bavarian -erl. Our corpus-linguistic investigation allows new insights into problems of distribution of type and token frequency according to degrees of morphosemantic transparency/ opacity and of the two rivalling diminutive formations. An analysis of diminutive acquisition is added as external evidence for or against previous claims. Acquisition data come from three longitudinal corpora and from 24 children of a transversal quasi-longitudinal study. Here the order of acquisition of diminutives according to the ten-step scale of morphosemantic transparency/opacity and to adult type and token frequency will be presented and the relation between morphosemantic and morphopragmatic meaning will be discussed.

L’acquisition des déterminants nominaux en français et en allemand: Une perspective interlangue sur la grammaticalisation des noms

In many languages, noun determiner acquisition is a central aspect of the emergence of grammar in children. The study compares the development of determiners — between one and three years of age — in the spontaneous productions of two children who acquire French and Austrian German, respectively. Starting with the contrast between Romance and Germanic languages and focusing on morphosyntactic factors, it evaluates the impact of typological and language-specific differences on determiner acquisition. We examine the prediction that determiners should emerge earlier in French than in German and classical hypotheses concerning the pre-eminence of definite over indefinite, masculine over feminine, and singular over plural in the light of developmental data.