Morphological modifications in Lithuanian child-directed speech

Abstract

Child-directed speech (CDS) is very important for the language development of a child. When talking to children adults modify their language by simplifying it and adapting it to the language acquisition stage of the child. Words and constructions that are used in CDS are aqcuired earlier by the child.This paper analyses the morphological modifications of Lithuanian CDS.The analysis proves that the most frequent morphological modifications of CDS include: 1) the higher frequency of verb tokens over noun tokens, 2) the low frequency of indefinite pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, and adjectives, and 3) the high frequency of diminutives and interjections.Prevalence of the denominative parts of speech has been influenced by the cognitive function; the abundance of verbs is conditioned by short utterances. The high frequency of diminutives is related to pragmatic function, intimacy, and emotions.

Keywords

• language acquisition
• longitudinal corpus
• premorphology
• protomorphology
• modularized morphology
• register of CDS
• input
• Lithuanian