Inducing Low-level Schema Extraction with Artificial Suffixes

Serbian and Russian children produce fewer adjective-noun gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns (e.g. ribica ‘little fish’) than with their simplex counterparts (e.g. riba ‘fish’). This study explores factors responsible for the diminutive advantage, using a gender-agreement task with Serbian-speaking children (N=24, mean age 4;4). Over four sessions, children were introduced to pictures of unfamiliar objects and animals that were labelled using novel nouns, varying in grammatical gender and derivational status, with half of the nouns introduced in simplex form and the other half in pseudo-diminutive form. Pseudo-diminutives were artificial derivations that mimic the regular morphological gender marking of Serbian diminutives, using unfamiliar artificial suffixes (–upa for feminine, –uf for masculine). Results indicated a pseudo-diminutive advantage for gender agreement by Session 2, suggesting that low-level schema extraction is a relatively fast process, based on morpho-phonological homogeneity of word clusters.