The distribution of parts-of-speech in mother-child interaction of Estonian and Lithuanian

Abstract

Children acquire language system very fast and rather easy due to their sensitivity to lexical and grammatical structures and their distribution (Behrens 2003). Additionally, a stable distribution of linguistic structures in the input could help children to recognize these structures (Bates & MacWhinney 1987). We are aware of the fact that in many languages children start with nouns followed by verbs, therefore the distribution of the main parts-ofspeech could signal important information about the syntactic structure of the early child speech. We have to admit that availability of the large modern corpora (Child Language Data Exchange System, CHILDES, MacWhinney 2000) could provide access to explore these questions on the data of many languages, however, the studies in this area are very limited (see Behrens, 2003 for German, LI and Fang 2011 for English, Argus, Kõrgesaar 2014 for Estonian). The primary aim of this study is to investigate the parts-of-speech frequency distribution of children and their input in two typologically different languages, Estonian and Lithuanian. The analysis focuses on the parts-of-speech, and includes nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns, as these are the main elements constructing the syntactic relations of the utterance. The Estonian and Lithuanian corpora have been studied and included data of two pairs of different sex children. Both corpora contain mainly dialogues between mothers and children. The participants were engaged in normal every day activities with their mothers. The main findings include the analysis from the data of approximately one year (from the age of 1;7 to 2;8) and demonstrate an interesting results: the high degree of stability in distribution of the parts-of-speech in the mother’ data and in the children’s later data. [...]