How Polish children switch from one case to another when using novel nouns: Challenges for models of inflectional morphology

Abstract

The two main models of children's acquisition of inflectional morphology—the Dual-Mechanism approach and the usage-based (schema-based) approach—have both been applied mainly to languages with fairly simple morphological systems. Here we report two studies of 2–3-year-old Polish children's ability to generalise across case-inflectional endings on nouns. In the first study, we found that the morphological form in which children first encounter a noun in Polish has a strong effect on their ability to produce other forms of that same noun. In the second study, we found that this effect is different depending on the target form to which children are switching. Similarity between inflectional endings played a crucial role in facilitating the task, whereas the simple frequency of either source or target forms was not a decisive factor in either study. These findings undermine Dual-Mechanism models that posit all-or-none acquisition of abstract morphological rules, and they also present serious challenges for usage-based models, in which frequency typically plays a key role.

Keywords:

• Acquisition of inflectional morphology
• Polish noun inflections
• Nonce word elicitation task
• Schema-based vs. rule-based approach

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the children and staff of the participating nurseries (Zlobek nr 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 21, and Przedszkole nr 52, 286, and 351 in Warsaw), Ewa Dabrowska for her work on the collection and glossing of the Marysia corpus, Ela Lazarewicz-Wyrzykowska for her help with coding reliabilities, Siu-Lin Rawlinson for providing the drawings, and Danielle Matthews, Ewa Dabrowska, Vera Kempe, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful and constructive feedback.

Notes

¹Moreover, the complexities are not evenly distributed across the system but, instead, are related to frequency of particular inflections; more frequent inflections retain more complexity (in terms of the number of allomorphs and their determinants), whereas the least frequent inflections are marked with a single ending (and, at the same time, these infrequent endings are longer than the frequent ones). This provides further support for the Network Model, which asserts that actual use (in terms of type and token frequencies) plays a key role in establishing and maintaining representation; i.e., infrequent patterns will be more likely to undergo regularisation, whereas frequent ones will be more likely to retain their idiosyncrasies; the latter, on the other hand, will be more prone to phonological reductions. Interestingly, these tendencies, predicted by the Network Model, are also found in cross-linguistic typological analyses (see: Croft, 2003).

²A girl followed for 6 weeks between the age 2;0.3 and 2;1.12, with five, one-hour long, recording sessions per week.

³The study was piloted on four adults. Exactly the same constructions were used as with children, and all responses were as expected in standard adult Polish.

⁴Since the presentation contexts and elicitation contexts remained the same irrespective of the gender of the noun and the only gender cue available was the particular ending used with a source form, we decided not to include gender as an additional factor.

⁵Huynh–Feldt adjustment of degrees of freedom was used wherever the sphericity assumption was violated.

⁶This study was also piloted on adults. Three people took part, exactly the same constructions were used as with children, and all responses were as expected in standard adult Polish.

⁷In this paper, whenever we discuss the role of context, we understand it as either an abstract grammatical case that a given form marks or a particular construction in which it is used. Differentiating between the two was not our aim. We now know that switching to the nominative from the dative feminine is more difficult than from the locative feminine, even though the forms are the same. We cannot tell, however, whether this is because the locative case is easier than the dative case, or simply because the constructions used in the locative conditions were easier than the constructions used in the dative conditions. The observed effect of the construction used for the elicitation of the nominative, nevertheless, suggests that the other effects should be treated on a construction-specific level, which is in line with a usage-based approach.

⁸This priming supposition clearly calls for further research, with proper manipulation of phonological and morpho-phonological factors. It might be even argued that such a priming effect takes place on the level of more abstract phonological features. For example, in Study 2 the apparent advantage of the instrumental masculine (-em), the only source inflection ending in a consonant, could be accounted for by the fact that zero-marked nominative forms also end in a consonant. It would require proper manipulation of phonological factors to fully investigate this possibility.