Verbal aspect in Serbian children's language production

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that an early usage of verbal aspect in children's spontaneous production is regularly observed in Slavic languages. However, this leads to the question whether the bare presence of aspect in early utterances is firm evidence that a child has acquired it. In order to show that the acquisition of aspect in Serbian is a process that lasts for several years, elicited production was inspected in children that had already achieved an apparent progress in language (3-5 year-olds). The comparisons with adults were made and several indicators of development were observed: a) the distribution of aspectual forms in children's and adults' language, b) the ability of functional usage of aspect in narrative, and c) the mastery of contrasting aspectual pairs. The findings provided the ground to propose three developmental stages assumed for the acquisition of Serbian aspect, and possible underlying mechanisms of development are discussed.