The State of the Art of First Language Acquisition Research on Slavic Languages

Ionin, Tania; Radeva-Bork, Teodora

doi:10.1353/jsl.2017.0013

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 59 publications

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“…However, 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 advantagethe 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). However, the diminutive advantage alone does not explain the acquisition process.…”

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The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

Pophristic

Schuler

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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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.

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The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

Pophristic

Schuler

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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Psycholinguistics and Language Acquisition

Ivanova-Sullivan,

Sekerina

2024

The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic Linguistics

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Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

Sekerina¹

2017

Journal of Slavic Linguistics

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This article provides an update on research in Slavic psycholinguistics since 2000 following my first review (Sekerina 2006), published as a position paper for the workshop The Future of Slavic Linguistics in America (SLING2K). The focus remains on formal experimental psycholinguistics understood in the narrow sense, i.e., experimental studies conducted with monolingual healthy adults. I review five dimensions characteristic of Slavic psycholinguistics-populations, methods, domains, theoretical approaches, and specific languages-and summarize the experimental data from Slavic languages published in general non-Slavic psycholinguistic journals and proceedings from the leading two conferences on Slavic linguistics, FASL and FDSL, since 2000. I argue that the current research trends in Slavic psycholinguistics are (1) a shift from adult monolingual participants to special population groups, such as children, people with aphasia, and bilingual learners, (2) a continuing move in the direction of cognitive neuroscience, with more emphasis on online experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking and neuroimaging, and (3) a focus on Slavic-specific phenomena that contribute to the ongoing debates in general psycholinguistics. The current infrastructural trends are (1) development of psycholinguistic databases and resources for Slavic languages and (2) a rise of psycholinguistic research conducted in Eastern European countries and disseminated in Slavic languages. * I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and Catherine Rudin for their helpful comments and especially suggestions regarding additional sources. All the mistakes are, of course, mine.

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The State of the Art of First Language Acquisition Research on Slavic Languages

Cited by 4 publications

References 59 publications

The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

The role of gender in the acquisition of the Serbian case system

Psycholinguistics and Language Acquisition

Slavic Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century

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