Morphological marking of animacy: differential object marking in the acquisition of Croatian

Language acquisition is a topic that has preoccupied researchers for years. Acquisition of morphology is very demanding for children, so they may use different strategies for simplifying complex segments of language morphology. The most frequent strategy is overregularization. The main goal of this research was to explain the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) in Croatian. DOM in Croatian refers to the different marking of the accusative case regarding the animacy status of the object. Acquisition of DOM has been observed through three idioms: child language, child directed speech and adult to adult speech. It was expected that overregularizations will be formed by adding the morpheme -a in accusative case of inanimate masculine nouns. The study is based on the data from the Croatian corpus of child language (Kovacevic, 2002) and the Croatian corpus of spoken language (Kuvac Kraljevic, Hrzica, in preparation). Overregularizations were found in all three idioms. In child language, overregularizations are evidence of language acquisition strategies. In child directed speech, they might represent one of the strategies that adults use to aid the child in acquiring language. Overregularizations found in adult speech are sparse and restricted to the Kajkavian dialect.