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Article: The later development of an early-emerging system: the curious case of the Polish genitive *.(Report)
- Article from:
- Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
- Article date:
- May 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract
Eighty Polish children and adolescents aged from 6 to 18 participated in a nonce word inflection experiment testing their productivity with the two genitive masculine endings, -a and -u, and their sensitivity to the distributional and semantic factors determining the choice of ending. All participants were able to use at least one ending productively, although the youngest children did not do so consistently, confirming earlier research which suggests that children are only partially productive with these inflections. In the youngest group, the choice of ending was not influenced by either semantic or distributional cues. Participants began to show ...