First Language Acquisition of Compounds

Wolfgang U. Dressler, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Laura E. Lettner

(Kommission für Linguistik der Österreichishen Akademie der Wissenschaften)

After a brief history of research (cf. Nicoladis 2005, Berman 2008) and the presentation of the
longitudinal naturalistic data base of two Austrian children (Lettner 2008, Klampfer &
Korecky-Kröll 2002), partially to be compared with the diary data of one child (Rainer 2008),
we will compare the emergence and early development of German compounds with published
results of typologically similar and different languages. Both language-internally and cross-
linguistically early emergence and children’s preference heavily depend on input token and
type frequency as well as on the family size of compound members. But we will plead in
addition for the relevance of productivity (using the criteria used in the processing study by
Dressler et al. 2005). Therefore, at least in German, noun-noun compounding emerges
simultaneously with the detection of morphology in noun and verb inflection and in
diminutive formation.
Theoretical topics dealt with will be the differentiation between compounds and
phrases (including narrow vs. loose compounds), e.g. by means of stress, order of emergence
of different compound types, the structure of the first base (root vs. stem vs. citation form,
with or without interfixes/linking elements), order of elements, recursivity, the role of
morphosemantic and morphotactic transparency, of iconicity, of variability. Finally it will be
briefly discussed whether any evidence can be found speaking for or against innate universals
of compounding.

References:

Berman, Ruth. 2008. Children’s acquisition of compounds. In: R. Lieber & P. Stekauer eds.
The Handbook of Compounding. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. To appear.
Dressler, Wolfgang U., Gary Libben, Gonia Jarema, Jacqueline Stark & Christiane Pons.
2005. Produttività nel processamento di composti: esempi tedeschi con e senza
interfiss. In: Grossmann & A.M. Thornton eds. La Formazione delle Parole, Atti 37.
congresso SLI. Roma: Bulzoni, 153-162.
Klampfer, Sabine & Katharina Korecky-Kröll. 2002. Nouns and verbs at the transition from
pre- to protomorphology: a longitudinal case study on Austrian German. In: M.D.
Voeikova & W.U. Dressler eds. Pre- and Protomorphology: Early Phases of
Morphological Development in Nouns and Verbs. München: Lincom, 61-74.
Lettner, Laura E. 2008. Der Erwerb von Nominalkomposition und Diminutivbildung durch
ein Wiener Kind. MA thesis, University of Vienna.
Nicoladis, Elena. 2005. Preschool children’s acquisition of compounds. in: G. Jarema & G.
Libben eds. The Representation and Processing of Compound Words. Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 96-124.
Rainer, Franz. 2008. Wortbildung und Spracherwerb. Ms. in preparation