The acquisition of Hungarian recursive possessives

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to address two principal inquiries. The first question to be addressed is the age at which children begin to comprehend and produce recursive possessives in a manner that is consistent with the adult data. Secondly, what patterns of comprehension and production are observed prior to this age. 

The acquisition of recursion tends to occur at a later age in the language learning process (Roeper 2011, Hollebrandse–Roeper 2014 and Roeper–Oseki 2018), and therefore the cross-linguistic literature indicates that the age of comprehension of recursive constructions is around 5–6 years and the age of production is around 7–9 years. The data will demonstrate that the acquisition of Hungarian recursive possessives can be dated earlier than previously thought. The experiments conducted indicate that comprehension of the structure under study reaches ceiling-level performance at the age of four, while the production of the full structure occurs at the age of six. In the event of an error, the target structure is typically only partially produced.

The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 1 describes linguistic recursion, Section 2 discusses the acquisition of recursion, Section 3 presents the syntactic features of recursive possessives. In Section 4, the previous cross-linguistic and Hungarian results on the structure under investigation are presented in detail. Section 5 presents the main experiments. Finally, Section 6 summarises the conclusions.