Acquiring diminutive allomorphs: taking item-specific characteristics into account

Abstract

Phonological characteristics and frequencies of stems and allomorphs have been explored as possible factors causing differences in production accuracies between allomorphic forms. However, previous findings are not consistent and the relative contributions of these factors are unclear. This study investigated target and erroneous productions of the Dutch diminutive, which has five allomorphs with varying type frequencies and of which the selection depends on the phonological characteristics of the stems. Typically developing children (N = 115, 5;1–10;3) were tested on their production of real and nonce diminutives. Linear mixed effects modelling was used to analyse the data taking nonverbal IQ into account. Type frequencies of the allomorphs and differences in phonological characteristics of the stems were found to be related to differences in production accuracies between the allomorphs. However, phonological characteristics of the stems appeared to have a bigger impact, mainly due to the phonological complexity of these characteristics.

De variatie van de Nederlandse diminutieve allomorfie: een empirische benadering

“…De allomorfie van het Nederlandse diminutief wordt grondig beschreven in de vakliteratuur (bijvoorbeeld Cohen 1958;Trommelen 1983 ;Kooij & Van Oostendorp 2003;Van der Hulst 2008), maar er is relatief weinig onderzoek dat berust op de analyse van echt taalmateriaal. Het bestaande empirische onderzoek richt zich op de verwerving en de productie van het diminutief (bijvoorbeeld Snow et al 1980;den Os & Harder 1987;Boersma 2018). Andere aspecten van het diminutief, zoals de variatie van de verschillende diminutiefvormen, moeten nog empirisch worden onderzocht.…”