engleski

Acquisition of nouns vs. verbs: Within the language analysis contrasted with crosslinguistic metaanalysis

One way of looking at early language development is to define what comes first and in which form. In other words, analysis of early vocabulary production can reveal us what type of words child acquires first and at what point we could expect relevant changes in the composition of lexicon. It has been generally accepted that child acquires first object names, that a prolonged one word stage preceeds the inflecting/combining phase and that words for actions come later. Such an approach reflects more or less universal principles that govern both cognitive and linguistic development. But is this really a fact? To answer this question, the analysis on spontaneous speech sample data will be presented (from 17 to 25 months). The participant is a girl, and she was recorded once every two weeks for 45 minutes sessions. The target language is Croatian - the language with relatively rich inflectional morphology, nouns as well verbs. Acquisition of nouns has been recognized for a long time as an important portion of child's language development, however some recent works have attributed to the acquisition of verbs more importance or/and in a different way than it was before. Contrasting the acquisition of nouns and verbs within one language, and than comparing them by looking at some crosslinguistic data, the aim is to contribute towards more general conclusions about language development as a mirror of linguistic differences within the languages.

verbs; nouns; grammatical morphology; language acquisition; crosslinguistic comparisons

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