Tvorba imenica u ranom jezičnom razvoju na temelju podataka za jedno dijete iz Hrvatskog korpusa dječjeg jezika
Acquisition of noun formation based on data from one child from the Croatian Corpus of Child Language

Summary/Abstract: Research on the acquisition of word formation has shown that the sequence and speed of this process may vary in typologically different languages (Clark 2001, 2014; Haman et al. 2009). In Croatian, the research on the acquisition of word formation focused primarily on the acquisition of diminutives (Palmović 2007; Kuvač and Palmović 2001); recently, however, there has been a growing interest in this subject area. Based on a case study, this paper aims to explore noun formation in early language development in Croatian and find out: a) when the first derived and compound nouns occur in the data analyzed and to what degree, b) which word formation patterns are found in child language, c) whether there is a difference in frequency of the use of suffixes between the data analyzed and general Croatian, d) to which semantic categories the produced derivatives belong. The results of this research are based on the study of the speech of Antonija, a girl, aged 1;3 to 2;8. Her speech was recorded and transcribed and is a part of the Croatian Corpus of Child Language (Kovačević 2002). Produced derivatives were recorded in the IBM SPSS Statistics 22 program and a frequency analysis was carried out. The results of the analysis show that the girl produced 164 lemmas and 511 tokens. The first noun derivative was produced at the age of 1;5. The girl used all word formation patterns except prefixation. The most productive pattern is suffixation, with diminutives being the most common semantic group. The girl produced 34 suffixes of various meanings. The most productive suffixes are –ica, –ić, –a, and –ek. The most common suffixes in Antonija’s speech differ from the most common suffixes in Croatian (Filko 2020) since the child produced various semantic categories of nouns in a different way from adult speakers. This research can be used as a starting point for future assumptions and research on the acquisition of word formation, in particular on the development of morphological awareness related to particular suffixes in child language.

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