Abstract
Four- and five-year-old children took part in an elicited familiar and novel Lithuanian noun production task to test predictions of input-based accounts of the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Two major findings emerged. First, as predicted by input-based accounts, correct production rates were correlated with the input frequency of the target form, and with the phonological neighbourhood density of the noun. Second, the error patterns were not compatible with the systematic substitution of target forms by either (a) the most frequent form of that noun or (b) a single morphosyntactic default form, as might be predicted by naive versions of a constructivist and generativist account, respectively. Rather, most errors reflected near-miss substitutions of singular for plural, masculine for feminine, or nominative/accusative for a less frequent case. Together, these findings provide support for an input-based approach to morphological acquisition, but are not adequately explained by any single account in its current form.
Highlights
A central task in language acquisition is learning how to mark ‘who did what to whom’ in basic canonical sentences
The rate of unscorable responses might be considered relatively high, by excluding such responses, we are conservatively minimising the chances of observing the predicted effects of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density
The input-based account that we are investigating does not make any predictions regarding the absolute error rate, but rather the way that the error rate will vary on the basis of word-form frequency and phonological neighbourhood density
Summary
A central task in language acquisition is learning how to mark ‘who did what to whom’ in basic canonical sentences. The way that this marking is instantiated, and the task facing learners, varies considerably from language to language. Languages such as English rely heavily on word order to convey meaning (e.g., compare The boy kicked the girl and The girl kicked the boy). Lithuanian – the focus of the present study – indicates the SUBJECT and OBJECT noun using, respectively, NOMINATIVE and ACCUSATIVE case-marking morphemes (and in principle, allows for a great deal of flexibility with regard to word order; e.g., [The]girl + ACC kicked [The]boy + NOM). The same is true for three-argument constructions (e.g., The man carried [the boy to the chair / the chair to the boy]; The man put [the boy on the table / the table on the boy]) which, in Lithuanian, involve the use of ACCUSATIVE and GENITIVE case, respectively
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