Acquisition of morphonological alternations in Russian verbs by children of preschool age

Within the study of first language acquisition in the languages with rich morphological systems morphonological alternations are the mechanisms of inflection needed to be observed. The thesis examines the acquisition of morphological alternations in the first person singular verb forms (for example, l jubitj – ljublju) by children aged between 4 and 6 years throughout the experimental research. It has been long observed that phonological context is the factor that can affect the choice of word conjugation. For example, on the materials of English language it was proven that adults are able to transfer irregular patterns of conjugation to nonce verbs formed from real verbs regarding the similarity of phonotactic structure. Thus we expect participants to be able to transfer regular morphonological alternations b // blj, m // mlj, v // vlj, and s // sh to novel verbs created from real verbs with such alternations in the paradigm.The main goal of the study is to examine the monolingual children’s ability to generalize morphonological alternations in Russian verbs. Also we want to explore different factors that can influence form choice and can facilitate the acquisition of morphological patterns. During the dictionary research, we defined stem adding as a factor that can relate to these processes and conducted our experiment to examine this factor alone and together with other factors. The experiment is based on the wug-test model. For the experiment, we use real and nonce words to examine the ability to generalize the alternations rather than only to apply them to known verbs. According to the results of the study, preschool children are able to generalize morphonological patterns to nonce verbs. However, stem adding, that we thought would affect the verb conjugation, is insignificant to nonce verbs conjugation. Nevertheless, this factor influences acquisition of real verbs with alternations. It is shown that children make less mistakes in the conjugation of verbs with both alternation and stem adding rather than alternations without stem adding. Thus, stem adding is one of the significant factors taking part in the alternation acquisition.