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Early morphological productivity in Hungarian: evidence from sentence repetition and elicited production*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2011

BÁLINT GÁBOR  and
ÁGNES LUKÁCS
BÁLINT GÁBOR*
Affiliation:
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
ÁGNES LUKÁCS
Affiliation:
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
*
Address for correspondence: Budapest University of Technology and Economics – Department of Cognitive Science, Stoczek utca 2 Budapest H-1111, Hungary. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task). Results suggest that Hungarian nominal and verbal suffixes can be used productively before the age of three. Children showed greater productivity with nominal than with verbal suffixes, and no productivity with novel suffixes; greater input variability facilitated productive use. These findings confirm that although morphological productivity is an early achievement, it is a gradual process influenced by several characteristics (e.g. syntactic category and variability) of the input. They also confirm that the new method is an effective way of testing morphological knowledge even at younger ages where other ways of eliciting grammatical knowledge often fail.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , March 2012 , pp. 411 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

[*]

This work has been supported by OTKA (T 034814) awarded to Professor Csaba Pléh. We wish to thank Anna Babarczy for her suggestions on the experimental design and comments on the paper. We are grateful to all the children who participated in our study, and also to the daycare and kindergarten teachers and parents for their cooperation.

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