The acquisition of root NN compounds in Romanian

Abstract

The paper investigates the comprehension and production of root NN compounds by Romanian children (mean age: 5;6) and adults.Given that endocentric root NN compounds are not productive in Romanian, a Romance language, the main goal of the study was to see to what extent children manage to ascribe an interpretation to or produce such compounds. The results show that, unlike in English, where head-final endocentric compounds are the most frequent ones, both Romanian monolingual children and adults tend to understand and produce much more blend compounds than endocentric ones (which, in Romanian, are head-first).

Keywords

• root nn compounds
• blends
• romanian
• l1 acquisition