engleski

The acquisition of noun morphology in Croatian

Numerous studies which dealt with the acquisition of different languages have shown the existence of some universal patterns and strategies in the acquisition process.Since Croatian is a morphologically and morphophonologically quite complex language and its morphology is very informative, an early acquisition of the morphological forms is necessary. Compared to English, the acquisition of the Croatian morphology starts earlier and lasts longer and is not completed even when children start to go to school (six years of age). This paper deals with the complexity of the acquisition process of the Croatian noun morphology. For the purpose of this paper a test was created which investigates the declination of 50 masculine nouns in two cases (nominative and genitive) in singular and plural. The test contains 19 declination patterns in total. For declination of those nouns whose grammatical rules were not acquired completely, children used different strategies: simplification of declination, omission of morphophological rules and overgeneralization.

Croatian morphology; language ascquisition

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