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ERIC Number: EJ971216
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Mar
Pages: 32
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Early Morphological Productivity in Hungarian: Evidence from Sentence Repetition and Elicited Production
Gabor, Balint; Lukacs, Agnes
Journal of Child Language, v39 n2 p411-442 Mar 2012
This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task). Results suggest that Hungarian nominal and verbal suffixes can be used productively before the age of three. Children showed greater productivity with nominal than with verbal suffixes, and no productivity with novel suffixes; greater input variability facilitated productive use. These findings confirm that although morphological productivity is an early achievement, it is a gradual process influenced by several characteristics (e.g. syntactic category and variability) of the input. They also confirm that the new method is an effective way of testing morphological knowledge even at younger ages where other ways of eliciting grammatical knowledge often fail. (Contains 1 footnote.)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A