Abstract
The lecture summarizes two studies investigating the influence of word imageability (the ability of words to elicit mental sensory images of their referents) on the acquisition of inflections. The first study complements Smolik (2014) by examining the acquisition of past tense and third person singular of verbs in the Manchester corpus.
Overall, 1181 verbs were examined, with 294 past tense forms and 104 third person singular forms acquired. Significant interaction between input frequency and imageability was found; the inflected forms were more likely in highly imageable words with high frequency.
The second study used a different method and different language. Parents of 317 children acquiring Czech responded to questionnaires asking about children's use of nominative singular plural forms of 62 nouns, and the third person singular and the past participle of 43 verbs.
Binomial mixed models were used to estimate the effect of imageability on the likelihood of reporting the inflected form (plural or past tense), with frequency and the production of the baseline forms as control predictors. The effect of imageability was significant in both verbs and nouns.
The studies provide converging evidence that imageability of words affects the acquisition of inflections: if two uninflected words are acquired at the same age, and their inflected form is equally frequent, the more imageable of the two will show in the inflected form earlier.