Children’s Tolerance of Word-Form Variation

Joint Authors

Kempe, Vera
Brooks, Patricia J.
Bruening, Paul R.
Dabašinskienė, Ineta
Alfieri, Louis

Source

Child Development Research

Issue

Vol. 2012, Issue 2012 (31 Dec. 2012), pp.1-12, 12 p.

Publisher

Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Publication Date

2012-11-14

Country of Publication

Egypt

No. of Pages

12

Main Subjects

Social Sciences (Multidisciplinary)

Abstract EN

How much morphological variation can children tolerate when identifying familiar words? This is an important question in the context of the acquisition of richly inflected languages where identical word forms occur far less frequently than in English.

To address this question, we compared children’s (N=96, mean age 4;1, range 2;11–5;1) and adults’ (N=96, mean age 21 years) tolerance of word-onset modifications (e.g., for stug: wug and wastug) and pseudoaffixes (e.g., kostug and stugko) in a label-extension task.

Word-form modifications were repeated within each experiment to establish productive inflectional patterns.

In two experiments, children and adults exhibited similar strategies: they were more tolerant of prefixes (wastug) than substitutions of initial consonants (wug), and more tolerant of suffixes (stugko) than prefixes (kostug).

The findings point to word-learning strategies as being flexible and adaptive to morphological patterns in languages.

American Psychological Association (APA)

Bruening, Paul R.& Brooks, Patricia J.& Alfieri, Louis& Kempe, Vera& Dabašinskienė, Ineta. 2012. Children’s Tolerance of Word-Form Variation. Child Development Research،Vol. 2012, no. 2012, pp.1-12.
https://search.emarefa.net/detail/BIM-469124

Modern Language Association (MLA)

Bruening, Paul R.…[et al.]. Children’s Tolerance of Word-Form Variation. Child Development Research No. 2012 (2012), pp.1-12.
https://search.emarefa.net/detail/BIM-469124

American Medical Association (AMA)

Bruening, Paul R.& Brooks, Patricia J.& Alfieri, Louis& Kempe, Vera& Dabašinskienė, Ineta. Children’s Tolerance of Word-Form Variation. Child Development Research. 2012. Vol. 2012, no. 2012, pp.1-12.
https://search.emarefa.net/detail/BIM-469124

Data Type

Journal Articles

Language

English

Notes

Includes bibliographical references

Record ID

BIM-469124