Morphological Complexity of Children Narratives in Eight Languages

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 4729–4738 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 4729 Morphological Complexity of Children Narratives in Eight Languages Gordana Hrˇzica1, Chaya Liebeskind2, Kristina ˇS. Despot3, Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova4, Laura Kamandulyt˙e-Merfeldien˙e5, Sara Koˇsutar1, Matea Kramari´c1, Giedr˙e Val¯unait˙e Oleˇskeviˇcien˙e6 1University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia, gordana.hrzica@gmail.com 2Jerusalem College of Technology, Jerusalem, Israel, liebchaya@gmail,com 3Institute for the Croatian Language and Linguistics, Zagreb, Croatia, kdespot@ihjj.hr 4Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, navratilova@ped.muni.cz 5Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, laura.kamandulyte-merfeldiene@vdu.lt 6 Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania, gentrygiedre@gmail.com Abstract The aim of this study was to compare the morphological complexity in a corpus representing the language production of younger and older children across different languages. The language samples were taken from the Frog Story subcorpus of the CHILDES corpora, which comprises oral narratives collected by various researchers between 1990 and 2005. We extracted narratives by typically developing, monolingual, middle-class children. Additionally, samples of Lithuanian language, collected according to the same principles, were added. The corpus comprises 249 narratives evenly distributed across eight languages: Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian and Spanish. Two subcorpora were formed for each language: a younger children corpus and an older children corpus. Four measures of morphological complexity were calculated for each subcorpus: Bane, Kolmogorov, Word entropy and Relative entropy of word structure. The results showed that younger children corpora had lower morphological complexity than older children corpora for all four measures for Spanish and Russian. Reversed results were obtained for English and French, and the results for the remaining four languages showed variation. Relative entropy of word structure proved to be indicative of age differences. Word entropy and relative entropy of word structure show potential to demonstrate typological differences. Keywords: language development, language sample analysis, morphological complexity, measurement 1. Linguistic complexity of languages In general, complexity is the number and variety of elements and the elaborateness of their interrelational structure (Rescher, 1998, p. 1). Linguistic complex- ity or the complexity of a certain language has been the focus of linguistic interest for a long time, but until recently research into linguistic complexity was based on impressionistic views, personal intuitions, govern- ing paradigms and fashions rather than being a seri- ous, methodologically rigorous field of study. Dur- ing the 19th century, linguistic complexity was viewed through the lens of supremacy differentiating between the more complex and culturally advanced (or superior) languages and the simple, primitive or underdeveloped languages (usually indigenous languages, pidgins, cre- oles etc.). With the rise of the idea of linguistic rela- tivism (known as Whorfianism or Sapir-Whorf Hypoth- esis), which stated that language shapes and even deter- mines the way its speakers think, this supremacist view was abandoned (more on this and the relationship be- tween linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism in Despot ˇStrkalj (2021)). Despite the fact that this hy- pothesis has been heavily criticized and mostly rejected in its strong form, it is historically very important ”as a reaction to the denigrating …

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