Noun development in a cross-linguistic perspective

The aim of this project is to investigate the development of the noun class in preschool children, aged 2-6, in a cross-linguistic perspective. For this purpose, we have chosen two closely cognate and typologically similar (i.e. weakly inflecting) languages, Austrian German and Dutch (collaboration with Prof. S. Gillis, University of Antwerp, Belgium) and one distant (introflecting) language, Hebrew (collaboration with Prof. D. Ravid, Tel Aviv University, Israel). In order to trace a detailed picture of children`s noun development, various methods of data collection will be used; data analysed range from longitudinal spontaneous speech, over experimental data (both production and comprehension) as well as interactional peer conversation and monologic text production. The development of the noun class in Austrian German, Dutch and Hebrew will be studied from a lexical- semantic, a morphological-morphosyntactic and a pragmatic point of view. The lexical-semantic analysis will be conducted along a 10-level complexity scale developed for this purpose. The morphological and morphosyntactic analysis will focus on the three nominal grammatical core categories number, gender and case. One main goal of this part will be to elaborate, for the three languages, a scale of perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes and to investigate its relevance for the acquisition of noun grammar; furthermore, the impact of factors such as frequency, morphotactic transparency and morphological productivity will be investigated. The pragmatic analysis will focus on the role of context in eliciting a variety of noun types and noun forms constrained by different elicitation methods. Furthermore, close cooperation with the partner project "Interaction of lexicon and morphology in first language acquisition/connectionism", submitted by Ao.Prof. Dr. Georg Dorffner (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna University) is planned, which will conduct connectionist language modelling based on the German data of the project.

The aim of this project is to investigate the development of the noun class in preschool children, aged 2-6, in a cross-linguistic perspective. For this purpose, we have chosen two closely cognate and typologically similar (i.e. weakly inflecting) languages, Austrian German and Dutch (collaboration with Prof. S. Gillis, University of Antwerp, Belgium) and one distant (introflecting) language, Hebrew (collaboration with Prof. D. Ravid, Tel Aviv University, Israel). In order to trace a detailed picture of children`s noun development, various methods of data collection will be used; data analysed range from longitudinal spontaneous speech, over experimental data (both production and comprehension) as well as interactional peer conversation and monologic text production. The development of the noun class in Austrian German, Dutch and Hebrew will be studied from a lexical-semantic, a morphological- morphosyntactic and a pragmatic point of view. The lexical-semantic analysis will be conducted along a 10-level complexity scale developed for this purpose. The morphological and morphosyntactic analysis will focus on the three nominal grammatical core categories number, gender and case. One main goal of this part will be to elaborate, for the three languages, a scale of perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes and to investigate its relevance for the acquisition of noun grammar; furthermore, the impact of factors such as frequency, morphotactic transparency and morphological productivity will be investigated. The pragmatic analysis will focus on the role of context in eliciting a variety of noun types and noun forms constrained by different elicitation methods. Furthermore, close cooperation with the partner project "Interaction of lexicon and morphology in first language acquisition/connectionism", submitted by Ao.Prof. Dr. Georg Dorffner (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna University) is planned, which will conduct connectionist language modelling based on the German data of the project.