This chapter explores the hypothesis that diminutive usage in child-directed speech may provide multiple benefits for language acquisition. We summarize a series of experiments that exposed naïve English-speaking adults to Dutch or Russian diminutives, and tested their ability to isolate words in fluent speech or acquire gender categories. Across studies, adults benefited from exposure to diminutives over their simplex counterparts, supporting the hypothesis that diminutives simplify word segmentation and morphology acquisition, by increasing word-ending invariance, regularizing stress patterns, and decreasing irregularity in morpho-syntactic categories. A similar diminutive advantage is observed in experimental studies of first language acquisition: Preschool children produce fewer gender agreement and case marking errors with diminutives than with simplex nouns across several languages (Russian, Serbian, Polish, Lithuanian).
2024. Discussion Questions of the “Aggressive Field” of Diminutivity: Semantic Dominants of Irrelevant Communication in Pedagogical Practice. Innovative science: psychology, pedagogy, defectology 7:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Odijk, Lotte & Steven Gillis
2023. Children steer the inflectional diversity of their parents: The role of word births and growing vocabulary. First Language 43:5 ► pp. 539 ff.
Schick, Johanna, Caroline Fryns, Franziska Wegdell, Marion Laporte, Klaus Zuberbühler, Carel P. van Schaik, Simon W. Townsend & Sabine Stoll
2022. The function and evolution of child-directed communication. PLOS Biology 20:5 ► pp. e3001630 ff.
Montrul, Silvina, Israel de la Fuente, Justin Davidson & Rebecca Foote
2013. The role of experience in the acquisition and production of diminutives and gender in Spanish: Evidence from L2 learners and heritage speakers. Second Language Research 29:1 ► pp. 87 ff.
Kempe, Vera, Patricia J. Brooks & Anatoliy Kharkhurin
2010. Cognitive Predictors of Generalization of Russian Grammatical Gender Categories. Language Learning 60:1 ► pp. 127 ff.
Dabašinskienė, Ineta
2009. Easy Way to Language Acquisition: Diminutives in Lithuanian Child Language. Ad verba liberorum 1:1
Dabašinskienė, Ineta
2012. Gender Differences in Language Acquisition: A Case Study of Lithuanian Diminutives. Journal of Baltic Studies 43:2 ► pp. 177 ff.
Kempe, Vera, Nada Ševa, Patricia J. Brooks, Natalija Mironova, Angelina Pershukova & Olga Fedorova
2009. Elicited production of case-marking in Russian and Serbian children: Are diminutive nouns easier to inflect?. First Language 29:2 ► pp. 147 ff.
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