The acquisition of case, number, and gender in Croatian

Acquisition of a Transparent Gender System: A Comparison of Italian and Croatian

“…On the other hand, our results suggest that the Croatian children go through at least two stages which could be observed with the included age groups. The first stage consists of similar error rates with F and M, but significantly higher error rates with N. We can summarize the stage as follows: (F = M) < N. This is likely due to the lower frequency of N: 6% in CDS (Kovačević et al, 2009). The second stage consists of F being at ceiling and the error rates with M and N being similar; this also entails that the agreement accuracy for N has significantly improved since it was much more error prone than M in the younger group.…”

“…Croatian is a language with rich derivational morphology, and this morphological richness could act as a booster for the acquisition of the inflectional paradigms (Kovačević et al, 2009, p. 153). Kovačević et al (2009) analyzed corpus data from one of the children present in the Kovačević (2004) corpus from ages 1;3-2;8. The study focuses on the child's incremental acquisition of the case system and only marginally looks at gender, focusing mainly on the use of nouns in relation to the three genders rather than the gender markings on agreeing elements.…”

“…Thus, the relevance of this study lies in the fact that we are analyzing how different factors in transparent languages can affect gender acquisition. Additionally, the acquisition of the gender system in Croatian is relatively new territory, with only one study taking it into consideration: Kovačević et al (2009) but not from the perspective of agreement. It will thus offer a starting point for further investigation of the acquisition of gender in Croatian, according to which more specific research questions could be tackled through more precisely designed tasks.…”

“…A transparent gender system entails that the gender of the noun is evident from its lemma, as nouns have a gender assigned as it is a part of their lexical entry ( Kupisch et al, 2002 , p. 109). Both Italian and Croatian have transparent gender systems ( Kovačević et al, 2009 ; Gudmundson, 2010 ). Nevertheless, languages diverge from transparency to some extent ( Audring, 2014 , p. 6) which means that transparency is not a categorical property, i.e., a binary distinction between a transparent and opaque system.…”

“…Croatian has three gender values (masculine-M, feminine-F, and neuter-N) while Italian has two (M and F). In Croatian the three gender values are not equally well represented in child directed speech (CDS) with the neuter amounting to only 6% of nouns ( Kovačević et al, 2009 , p. 161), whereas no such discrepancy is noted for Italian. Italian has obligatory gender-marked articles that occur with the noun and these are defined as the first and most frequent syntactic cue for gender, thus enhancing the transparency of the language ( Chini, 1995 ).…”