Show simple item record

dc.contributor.authorMitrofanova, Natalia
dc.contributor.authorWestergaard, Marit
dc.date.accessioned2018-09-04T11:07:01Z
dc.date.available2018-09-04T11:07:01Z
dc.date.issued2018-03-15
dc.description.abstractThis paper focuses on the acquisition of locative prepositional phrases in L1 Norwegian. We report on two production experiments with children acquiring Norwegian as their first language and compare the results to similar experiments conducted with Russian children. The results of the experiments show that Norwegian children at age 2 regularly produce locative utterances lacking overt prepositions, with the rate of preposition omission decreasing significantly by age 3. Furthermore, our results suggest that phonologically strong and semantically unambiguous locative items appear earlier in Norwegian children's utterances than their phonologically weak and semantically ambiguous counterparts. This conclusion is confirmed by a corpus study. We argue that our results are best captured by the Underspecified P Hypothesis (UPH; Mitrofanova, 2017), which assumes that, at early stages of grammatical development, the underlying structure of locative utterances is underspecified, with more complex functional representations emerging gradually based on the input. This approach predicts that the rate of acquisition in the domain of locative PPs should be influenced by the lexical properties of individual language-specific grammatical elements (such as frequency, morphological complexity, phonological salience, or semantic ambiguity). Our data from child Norwegian show that this prediction is borne out. Specifically, the results of our study suggest that phonologically more salient and semantically unambiguous items are mastered earlier than their ambiguous and phonologically less salient counterparts, despite the higher frequency of the latter in the input (Clahsen et al., 1996).en_US
dc.description.sponsorshipUiT The Arctic University of Norwayen_US
dc.descriptionAccepted manuscript version. Published version available at <a href=https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000016> https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000016</a>.en_US
dc.identifier.citationMitrofanova, N. & Westergaard, M. (2018). Acquisition of locative utterances in Norwegian: structure-building via lexical learning. Journal of Child Language, 45, 981-1005. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000016en_US
dc.identifier.cristinIDFRIDAID 1569548
dc.identifier.doidoi:10.1017/S0305000918000016
dc.identifier.issn0305-0009
dc.identifier.issn1469-7602
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10037/13645
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherCambridge University Press (CUP)en_US
dc.relation.journalJournal of Child Language
dc.rights.accessRightsopenAccessen_US
dc.subjectVDP::Humaniora: 000::Språkvitenskapelige fag: 010en_US
dc.subjectVDP::Humanities: 000::Linguistics: 010en_US
dc.subjectNorwegianen_US
dc.subjectlocative prepositionsen_US
dc.subjectlexical learningen_US
dc.titleAcquisition of locative utterances in Norwegian: structure-building via lexical learningen_US
dc.typeJournal articleen_US
dc.typeTidsskriftartikkelen_US
dc.typePeer revieweden_US


File(s) in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following collection(s)

Show simple item record