Abstract
Serbo-Croatian is marked for seven cases and has a noun class vs. gender distinction. Given the complexity of the inflectional system, we look at Serbo-Croatian as a case study in case acquisition. We explore different correlations available in the input that children could leverage to acquire the case system in Serbo-Croatian. We ask three main questions: 1) does a noun’s gender predict the noun’s nominative singular suffix? 2) does a noun’s nominative singular suffix predict the noun’s gender? and 3) does a noun’s noun class predict the noun’s gender? Specifically, we ask whether the language input provides children with sufficient evidence to form these three productive generalizations. To test this, we apply the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to a corpus of 270 inflected Serbian nouns. Within this set of data, we find that: 1) all nominative singular suffixes productively predict a gender; 2) all genders productively predict a nominative singular suffix (with the exception of the neuter gender which predicts two suffixes); and 3) two of the three noun classes predict a single gender. We conclude that the input provides sufficient evidence for these productive correlations and we argue that children can leverage these generalizations to infer the declension patterns or gender of novel nouns. We discuss how, given these findings, children could acquire most of the inflectional system by focusing on gender as a categorization system for nouns, without needing to posit abstract categories of noun class.
Highlights
Cases occur in many of the world’s languages, yet how case inflectional systems are acquired is not well understood
Most research to date has focused on the diminutive advantage – the finding that caregivers use more diminutives in speech to young children, which are thought to help children acquire and use complicated case inflectional systems
By definition nominative singular ending is determined by noun class – this question essentially asks whether a child can assume that a noun belongs to a specific noun class based on the noun’s gender
Summary
Cases occur in many of the world’s languages, yet how case inflectional systems are acquired is not well understood. Is a crucial component in the acquisition process. The manner in which children acquire this system in Slavic languages is still an open area of research. Most research to date has focused on the diminutive advantage – the finding that caregivers use more diminutives in speech to young children, which are thought to help children acquire and use complicated case inflectional systems (see Ionin & Radeva-Bork 2017 for an overview). Children who are not exposed to diminutives in their input should, in principle, still be able to acquire the whole inflectional system. In many languages, including certain dialects of Serbian, diminutives occur only rarely in speech to young children. Kempe and colleagues (2009) found that, for Serbian-speaking mothers, only 5% of noun tokens were introduced as diminutives in their child-directed speech, compared to 55% of nouns for Russian- and Polish-speaking mothers
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