The acquisition of demonstratives in a complex noun class system

IF 0.7 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS Word Structure Pub Date : 2022-11-01 DOI:10.3366/word.2022.0209
Serge Sagna, Virve Vihman, M. Vihman, Dunstan Brown
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Abstract

We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) and the agreement categories of number and gender, as well as having four morphological types that create an additional dimension of complexity for children to learn. These demonstrative types are each associated with a range of syntactic functions with partial overlaps. From nearly seven hours of recordings, including children at three age points (2;0, 2;6 and 3;0), we extracted 218 demonstrative tokens from the children’s speech, matched with 205 tokens from a sub-sample of caregiver speech. The youngest children can be described as restricting their use of demonstratives to a small set of learned items, with evidence of generalisation and productivity arising over the course of development, alongside an increase in frequency and development in distribution patterns of the various demonstrative forms to more target-like usage in the 3;0 sample. At age three we observe more variation by syntactic function. As has been found in other languages, children acquiring Eegimaa seem to make use of the diverse forms of demonstratives early, but they do not yet make use of the full range of forms even at age three, when they are beginning to produce more systematic forms of the demonstratives across syntactic contexts and with a variety of genders.
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复杂名词类系统中指示词的习得
我们对2至3岁儿童习得Eegimaa(ISO 369–3 bqj)的指示系统进行了探索性研究,Eegima是一种濒危语言,属于尼日尔-刚果门大西洋科的Jóola集群,塞内加尔西南部约有13000名使用者使用。Eegimaa指示词表达与说话者的距离(近端、中间和远端)以及数字和性别的一致性类别,并具有四种形态类型,为儿童学习创造了额外的复杂性维度。这些指示类型都与一系列具有部分重叠的句法功能相关联。从近7个小时的录音中,包括三个年龄点(2;0,2;6和3;0)的儿童,我们从儿童的言语中提取了218个指示性标记,与护理者言语的子样本中的205个标记相匹配。年龄最小的孩子可以被描述为将他们对指示词的使用限制在一小部分学习项目上,有证据表明,在发展过程中出现了泛化和生产力,同时各种指示形式的分布模式的频率和发展也在增加,在3中使用更像目标;0个样本。在三岁时,我们观察到更多的句法功能变化。正如在其他语言中发现的那样,习得Eegimaa的儿童似乎很早就使用了各种形式的指示词,但即使在三岁时,他们也还没有完全使用各种形式,因为他们开始在不同的句法语境和性别中产生更系统的指示词形式。
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来源期刊
Word Structure
Word Structure LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS-
CiteScore
1.60
自引率
0.00%
发文量
10
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