engleski

Acquisition of aspect in SLI children in Croatian

All Croatian verbs have one of two aspects: perfective or imperfective. The aspect is expressed either lexically or morphologically, by affixation. Perfectivization of imperfective verbs and vice versa is a very productive part of derivational morphology in Croatian. In addition, prefixation is the most productive way of verbal perfectivization (e.g. pisati- na-pisati 'write' - 'write down' or paliti - u-paliti 'burn' - 'set fire') both in adult language and child language. The acquisition of prefixed verbs can be treated as a part of the acquisition of morphology. Accordingly, proper production emerges later and it is more demanding that the acquisition of the suffixes. Prefixed verbs can be treated as (un-analyzable) lexical items without child's manipulation of prefixes as morphemes. These two options will be tested on a group of 13 SLI and 13 non-SLI children on a sentence completion task. The results will show lower rate of correct answers in the SLI group and their employment of lexical substitution strategy to avoid the unknown form.

aspect; verbal system; children with SLI

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