The Acquisition of Diminutives in Dutch
نویسنده
چکیده
The acquisition of diminutives by a single child between the ages of 1;5 and 2;5 is studied. The data cover the very first uses of diminutives. The child's use of diminutive word forms is analyzed quantitatively and compared with her mother's use. This comparison reveals a high correspondence between the child's and the mother's use, i.a. in terms of the frequency of the various allomorphs in the mother's language and the order of acquisition. The regularities of the allomorphic variation exhibited in the child's diminutive formation is analyzed qualitatively, and the formal and semantic concomitants are scrutinized. The hypothesis is formulated that the formal and semantic aspects of diminutive formation are not yet integrated.
منابع مشابه
Diminutives provide multiple benefi ts for language acquisition
Th is chapter explores the hypothesis that diminutive usage in child-directed speech may provide multiple benefi ts for language acquisition. We summarize a series of experiments that exposed naïve English-speaking adults to Dutch or Russian diminutives, and tested their ability to isolate words in fl uent speech or acquire gender categories. Across studies, adults benefi ted from exposure to d...
متن کاملDiminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues.
In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g., birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions ...
متن کاملData Mining as a Method for Linguistic Analysis: Dutch Diminutives*
We propose to use data mining techniques (inductive techniques for the automatic acquisition of comprehensible knowledge from data) as a method in linguistic analysis. In the past, such techniques have mainly been used in linguistic engineering applications to solve knowledge acquisition bottlenecks. In this paper we show that they can also assist in linguistic theory formation by providing a n...
متن کاملDiminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: cross-linguistic evidence.
Final-syllable invariance is characteristic of diminutives (e.g., doggie), which are a pervasive feature of the child-directed speech registers of many languages. Invariance in word endings has been shown to facilitate word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005) in an incidental-learning paradigm in which synthesized Dutch pseudonouns were used. To broaden the cross-linguistic evidence fo...
متن کاملExploring the facilitating effect of diminutives on the acquisition of Serbian noun morphology
........................................................................................... 14 Chapter 1.......................................................................................... 16
متن کامل