Роль речи взрослого в усвоении ребенком прилагательных: на материале русского и литовского языков

The role of linguistic input in early adjective acquisition: Evidence from Russian and Lithuanian

This paper deals with adult conversational strategies used in order to stimulate the early acquisition of the semantics and grammar of adjectives. Since the adjective is considered one of the most complex and non-conceptual salient linguistic categories to acquire, we can hypothesize that adult support towards adjective acquisition is necessary and, consequently, linguistic input should be not only rich, but also well-structured in the flow of conversation. The aim of the present study is to compare caregiver strategies relative to early adjective acquisition in the morphologically rich and strongly inflected Russian and Lithuanian languages. The study is based on the longitudinal corpus data of a Russian boy and a Lithuanian girl. Both subjects are typically-developing monolingual children, similar in age (1;8–2;8), social characteristics and linguistic age (MLU development). The transcribed corpus of conversations between the children and their caregivers was annotated for multipurpose automatic linguistic analysis, using tools of the program CHILDES (B. MacWhinney). During the investigation, the positional, pragmatic, structural, and semantic features of caregiver utterances relative to the children’s adjectives were analyzed (see also Kilani-Schoch et al. 2008, Kazakovskaya 2011). The additional criterion of the caregivers’ positive, negative or neutral feedback to the children’s early adjectives was also taken into consideration. After the analysis the following can be stated. All parental support, both in Russian (RU) and Lithuanian (LT), occur in both initiative and reactive situations. Initiative utterances (RU – 11%, LT – 27%) can be described as attempts to elicit the child’s adjective (e.g., caregivers use definite semantic types of question or ask a child to say a particular adjective), while reactions (RU – 89%, LT – 73%) are special structural modifications (e.g., expansions, reformulations, direct/indirect corrections or pure/focus repetitions) of the child’s previous adjectival utterance. Initial caregiver utterances can contain either a target adjective (RU – 27%, LT – 93%), or merely stimulate (RU – 73%, LT – 7%) their emergence (in particular, special qualitative questions, such as What color is the ball? vs. What do you call this color?). Although both corpora caregiver support include all typical communicative types of utterances (statements, questions, exclamations or requests), interrogatives and statements are the most frequent types: Interrogatives dominate in initial context (RU – 79%, LT – 63%) and statements prevail in the reactive one (RU – 50%, LT – 59%). The distribution of pragmatic turns revealed the dominance of conversational reactions (RU – 82%, LT – 83%) towards the semantics of early adjectives (i.e. adults react to the content of the child’s utterance), whereas metalinguistic reactions (when adults react to the form of the child’s utterance) were rare (RU – 18%, LT – 17%) and mainly focused on the incorrect morphology (e.g., erroneous derivational forms, such as diminutive adjectives, synthetic comparatives and superlatives) and syntax (e.g., agreement errors or inappropriate word order). The structural types of reaction to the child’s adjective production were identified: a) expansions, e.g.: CHILD: Here is big [ball]. ADULT: Here is big ball; b) pure repetitions, e.g.: CHILD: [It is] heavy. ADULT: [It is] heavy; c) reformulations, e.g.: CHILD: Good dog. ADULT: Right, the dog is good; d) corrections, e.g.: CHILD: Green sausage. ADULT: The sausage is pink, not green; e) focus repetitions, e.g. CHILD: Black cat. ADULT: Black [cat]; f) clarifications, e.g.: CHILD: Hot pot. ADULT: What did you say? Expansions (RU – 29%, LT – 31%), pure repetitions (RU – 26%, LT – 25%), and reformulations (RU – 14%, LT – 14%) predominate in both corpora, w