Gender Differences in Language Acquisition: A Case Study of Lithuanian Diminutives

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: first language acquisitiondiminutivesLithuaniangenderpragmaticssemantics Acknowledgements I would like to thank Ieva Pramaneckienė for her assistance in data collection and coding. The corpus of the girl Monika was collected and coded by Ingrida Balčiūnienė. The corpus of Elvijus was collected by Kristina Bartkienė and coded by Laura Kamandulytė. Notes 1. Diminutives are noun derivations that usually denote smallness and are associated with a wide range of pragmatic features like endearment, attachment and sympathy, etc. 2. A word with six diminutive suffixes puod-el-ait-uk-ėl-yt-ėl-is ‘cup:DIM (6)’ is known from folk tales. Such words are extremely rare in everyday usage. 3. The spurt of diminutives in Rūta's speech shows the increase of these forms just in one month. During the 1;7–1;8 period the percentage of diminutives has increased form 21% to 51% (Savickienė 2003 Savickienė, I. 2003. The Acquisition of Lithuanian Noun Morphology, Wien: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. [Google Scholar]). 4. In colloquial Lithuanian women are often addressed by a masculine form of the noun, especially if it is a diminutive form, e.g. kačiuk ‘kitten’, Linuk (female name), mažiuk ‘little’, Lorečiuk (female name). 5. Self-reference is a form of reference when a child addresses him/herself using a name instead of the personal pronoun ‘I’. On self-reference in Lithuanian see Savickienė (2003 Savickienė, I. 2003. The Acquisition of Lithuanian Noun Morphology, Wien: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. [Google Scholar]). 6. For Elvijus's data, 1 month is missing (2;5).