Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1983, Page 116

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Randa Mulford
example, they might call ‘a machine that helps you to read (að
lesaf^bók ‘book’ or ‘a man who feeds (að mata) babies’—
‘Daddy’. This type of response was most common in the youngest
group, but relatively rare among the older children. Children who
gave suppletive responses were encouraged to come up with another,
nonsuppletive name, although some of the younger children could not
be persuaded to change their responses and stuck to the suppletive
answers.
2.5
To summarize, the children in this study became more successful
at recognizing the verbal roots of unfamiliar -ari nouns as they got
older. They were also increasingly likely to create new agent and in-
strument nouns by adding the -ari suffix to familiar verbs, although
they are also able to use other word formation processes, such as
compounding. Before considering the significance of these results, it
would be useful to look at comparable data from children learning
English.
3. Comparative Results: Icelandic and English
The English language counterpart of this study was conducted in
the United States by Eve Clark and Barbara Hecht of Stanford Uni-
versity. Their results are reported in Clark and Hecht (1982). In gen-
eral, the results from the Icelandic and English studies are strikingly
similar. Tables V and VI show Clark and Hecht’s figures for extracting
the verb from -er nouns (Table V) and for producing -er suffixes
(Table VI). The figures from Icelandic children are included in paren-
theses for comparison. The patterns of change with age (i.e. improved
performance in older age groups) and the distributions of results by
agent and instrument categories are virtually identical. There are no
significant differences in either task when the means for the two lan-
guage groups are compared.
Greater differences show up if we consider what children in the
two language communities did when they were not using the -er/-ari
suffix to form new nouns. Table VII summarizes the proportions of
agent and instrument noun types that the English- and Icelandic-
speaking children supplied.1 While the use of the derivational -er/-ari
suffix and compounding is generally comparable in both languages,