HUNGARIAN KIDS AND CROATIAN LANGUAGE: BILINGUISM DISAPPEARING

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HUNGARIAN KIDS AND CROATIAN LANGUAGE BILINGUISM
DISAPPEARING

• Jelena Kuvac
• Laboratory for Psycholinguistic Research
• University of Zagreb
• labpolin_at_erf.hr
• Lidija Cvikic
• Department of Croatian language and literature
• University of Zagreb

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Hungarian minority in Croatia

• 16.596 Hungarian people im Croatia
• 12.650 speak Hungarian as a mother-tongue
• Baranja ES Zmajevac (Vörosmarty) and ES Lug ?
  east of Croatia

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Some previous research

• The teachers estimated how children learn
  Croatian (Vodopija, 2002.)
• 1st grade listen
• 2nd grade comprehension
• 3th grade start to speak
• 4th grade either speak or dont ? they will
  never speak
• The 60 Hungarian children in Baranja in everyday
  communication use only Hungarian language (Kuvac,
  2002.)
• The attitudes towards Croatian language are
  negative (Kuvac, 2002.)
• The number of language errors does not decrease
  with age (the influence of inappropriates
  educational demands) (Cvikic, Kuvac, 2003.)

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General goalTo observe how children who speak
Croatian as L2 or foreign language acquire/learn
Croatian language and how they satisfy
educational demands

• SAMPLE
• 12 children ? 1st grade elementary school
  Zmajevac and Kotlina
• ?
• To get insight into lexical knowledge
• How they apply morphological rules?

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Language tasks nonstandardized, working
materials

• Morphological Test
• Noun morphology
• Verb morphology

• Vocabulary Test
• Comprehension
• Production

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RESULTS VOCABULARY TEST

• Comprehension
• Meat 91,6
• Star 91,6
• Hand 83,3
• Bird 83,3
• Fruit 83,3
• Bridge 75,0
• Knife 66,6
• Picture 66,7
• Wind 66,6
• Lake 41,6
• 75

• Production
• Cat 91,6
• House 66,6 ?
• Eye 25,0 ?
• Window 25,0 ?
• Tooth 16,6 ?
• Stone 25,0 ?
• Ear 16,6 ?
• Thief 8,3 ?
• Rope 0 ?
• River 0 ?
• 27,5

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RESULTS MORPHOLOGY TEST

• Noun morphology
• masculina ? 19 different paradigmatics patterns
• voice changes
• sibilarization (vojnik-vojnici),
• palatalization (junak-junace),
• inconstant a (pas-psi),
• changes of final -o in l (andeo-andela),
• collective nouns (cvijet-cvijeca),
• short (konj-konji) and long (vlak-vlakovi)
  plural

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Overview of correct answers

• The same tendency in the acquisition of noun
  morphology as in Croatian children
• Nom Sing ? lexical problem
• Gen Sing ? repeat Nom Sing (cešalj) or they do
  not apply voice changes (cešalja)
• Nom Plu ? repeat Nom Sing (jastuk) produce new
  forms but morphological incorrect
  (jastuke), they do not apply voice changes
  (jastuki)
• Gen Plu ? repeat Nom Sing (pas) produce new
  forms but morphological
  incorrect (pasevi), they do not apply voice
  changes (pas)

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Verb morphology

• Some previous research have shown following
  factors that influence the acquisition of
  morphology
• frequency of verb types (Larsen-Frieeman,
  1976
• frequency of particular verb Ellis, 1996 and
  others)
• transparency of verb types (Dressler, 1998)
• complex morphology ? Croatian grammar 7
  different verb types
• 3 different verbs types according to the ralation
  between infinitive and present forms (the
  frequency criterium)
• citati citAM
• raditi radIM
• plakati - placEM

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Results

• Singular
• AM ? prototypical
• EM ? complex morphology but very frequent words
• (errors pišem ?pisam)
• IM ? the lowest results the lowest frequency of
  verbs
• (errors letim ? letem)
• Plural
• more incorrect answers than in singular
• Reason
• one more morphological rule
• IM ? i-e (radi-rade) (errors rade ?radiju)
• EM ? e u (piše-pišu) (errors pišu ?pisaju)

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CONCLUSION

• Word comprehension is better than production ?
  psycholinguistic rule (Barrett, 1995, Taylor,
  1990)
• Results of words production too low for
  communication demands
• Problems with noun and verb morphology ? lexicon
  is base for morphology acquisition (Bates, 1997.)