The acquisition of Croatian prepositional phrases by mono- and bilingual children

Abstract

Children acquire prepositional phrases later than content words during language acquisition. This paper aims to describe the acquisition of prepositional phrases in Croatian, focusing on the order of their acquisition and the influence of their frequency in child-directed speech. To gain insight into the early acquisition of prepositional phrases, the longitudinal spontaneous child speech (CS) and child-directed speech (CDS) of three monolingual children were analysed, as well as a smaller sample of CS and CDS from four bilingual children. The results suggest that the acquisition of prepositional phrases is similar for monolingual and bilingual speakers, and that it depends on how often the children hear the prepositional phrases. Our findings generally support the idea that language development in bilingual children is similar to that of monolingual children, but that an analysis of a larger sample of bilingual children is needed.

Keywords

• child language, child-directed speech, frequency, monolingual development, bilingual development, prepositions