The acquisition of diminutives in 12 languages—Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Austrian German, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Hebrew—is considered in this work. The editors present a set of chapters that reflect systematicity across the languages and demonstrate links and comparisons among the chapters. This typological study of the acquisition of diminutives relates diminutives to the overall morphological properties of the languages, to the morphological richness in the domain of diminutives, and to the frequencies in their use. Most of the chapters report on longitudinal studies primarily based on spontaneous early child speech data in comparison with the child-directed speech of their caregivers, focusing particularly on several recurrent topics. First, the chapters support the view that the general endearment flavor of diminutives tends to be acquired earlier than the meaning of smallness, which at early stages of acquisition is expressed by words like small. Additionally, most of the studies confirm the assumption that diminutives are much more frequent in child-directed speech than in adult-directed speech and show how the acquisition of diminutives parallels the caretakers' usage patterns, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, the studies address the question of whether and to what extent diminutives can simplify the acquisition of morphology and show that the answer is dependent on the morphological properties of a particular language, including the relative productivity, complexity, and transparency of its diminutive formation; one chapter also reports on experiments that suggest that diminutives can be beneficial for language acquisition in general, including SLA.
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