Children’s analogism in the acquisition of morphology as a reflection of linguistic thinking

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents psycholinguistic personal case study in its character. It focuses on the analogous (hypergeneralizing) formation of nouns and verbs in the ontogenesis of children’s speech through the prism of linguistic principles. The basic research material is diary entries of 364 grammatical forms of two children aged 1;10 – 2;7 years and 3;8 – 4;5 years (recorded during the ten months in 2017), which are incompatible with the literary norm of the Slovak language. The basic starting point was the hypothesis that agrammatic forms in children’s speech can be categorized and explained on the basis of natural language principles, whose application presupposes a certain level in the development and functioning of logical and thought operations and the cognitive system as such. The analysis of research material enabled us to generalize certain tendencies in the ontogenesis of the morphological system in children, which lead to structural iconism, uniform symbolization, systemicity and unification of the word-formation basis. The application of the principles in children’s speech has proved to be specific – the child applies in his speech mainly the principles of analogy, naturalness and dominance. The limit of the presented longitudinal research is the small number of respondents and the very nature of the research problem, whose solution requires intensive contact with the child subject, a longer period of time and more extensive research material.