Children’s Tolerance of Word-Form Variation
Joint Authors
Kempe, Vera
Brooks, Patricia J.
Bruening, Paul R.
Dabašinskienė, Ineta
Alfieri, Louis
Source
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