Jonas Stepsys

Institute of the Lithuanian Language, Research Centre of Standard Language, Undergraduate

Vytautas Magnus University, Department of Lithuanian Language, Graduate Student

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I am a passionate linguist, leader, and educator, pursuing my PhD in developmental linguistics at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language. My research interests include psycholinguistics, language acquisition and developmental language disorder. I have published several journal articles and presented at international conferences on these topics.
Supervisors: Doc. dr. Laura Kamandulyte-Merfeldienė

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Jagdev Singh

Dalia Kiseliunaite

Klaipeda University

Vitalija Kazlauskiene

Vilnius University

Dalia Jakulytė

Klaipeda University

Jogile Teresa Ramonaite

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

Vilnius University

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The acquisition of adjective agreement by bilingual children

Applied Liinguistics, 2023

While studies on the acquisition of adjective agreement in the Lithuanian language are scarce, so... more While studies on the acquisition of adjective agreement in the Lithuanian language are scarce, some research indicates that children face challenges in understanding morphosyntactic relationships, leading to errors in the use of adjectives and nouns in agreement. Consequently, children may switch less common inflections to more common ones, select declension paradigms based on analogy to other words, and exhibit errors in the grammatical category of gender. The present study investigates adjective agreement in bilingual children. Thirty-five bilingual children residing outside Lithuania completed a task based on a corpus of children’s and child-directed speech. The experimental task aimed to capture the diversity of adjective and noun paradigms. Test choices included, alongside the correct one, a paradigm error (a different paradigm inflection), a number error (a different number in the target paradigm), and a gender error (a different gender in the target paradigm). Results reveal that bilingual children encounter the most difficulty with agreement due to inflectional diversity, involving changes in inflection from unproductive to productive paradigms and copying noun inflections. Agreement errors in gender and number are also associated with paradigm diversity.

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Challenges in adjective agreement: an experimental study on bilingual children and adults learning Lithuanian as a foreign language

Deeds and Days, 2024

This study aims to discuss the challenges faced by bilingual children and non-native adults in ag... more This study aims to discuss the challenges faced by bilingual children and non-native adults in agreement of adjectival words while learning Lithuanian. The study used an experimental task based on children’s language corpus. This task was designed to reflect the diversity of adjectival and noun declension paradigms and grammatical categories. Data was collected from 35 bilingual children and 25 adults learning Lithuanian as a foreign language.
The results of this study show that bilingual children primarily struggle with gender agreement in adjectival words, while non-native adults most frequently make errors in paradigm agreement. These errors are related to changing the endings of unproductive paradigms to productive ones, replication of noun inflections, and a preference for unmarked grammatical categories over marked ones.

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Use of Lithuanian singular nouns in plural forms: lexicalization and terminization

Studies about Languages, 2022

The purpose of this article is to determine the lexicalization of the grammatical form of selecte... more The purpose of this article is to determine the lexicalization of the grammatical form of selected Lithuanian singular abstract nouns, which is related to the change in the grammatical form of the number of words. It is assumed that due to the change in the grammatical form of the number, the lexical meaning also changes. It is relevant to describe lexicalized nouns in more detail, methods of recognizing lexicalization, because the lexicon is the fastest-changing layer of the language, so it is necessary to record changes, and to update and edit dictionaries, especially since this analysis is based on examples of usage from texts. Non-term lexicon examples were selected from the Current Lithuanian Language Textbook (DLKT), Delfi.lt Textbook (DT) and online Google search. Although the statistical data of the texts showed that the phenomenon of pluralization of the studied singular abstract nouns is not very widespread, the analysis shows that pluralized lexemes acquire new meanings (or semes). Some have a high degree of lexicalization, such lexemes could be presented in a separate dictionary article of the plural lemma. Otherwise, when the degree of lexicalization of plural forms is low, they are not considered independent lexical units. The lexicalization of the grammatical form of the term lexicon is determined based on the meanings presented in the Dictionary of the Current Lithuanian Language (DLKŽ) and the term bank of the Republic of Lithuania (TB). The results of the research show that the transition of everyday language words into the lexicon of a special language is determined by terminization, but there are also cases where there is no clear semantic distance between the meanings of a word in everyday language and a term, which allows us to talk about the absence of terminization.

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The acquisition of adjective agreement by bilingual children

Applied Liinguistics, 2023

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Challenges in adjective agreement: an experimental study on bilingual children and adults learning Lithuanian as a foreign language

Deeds and Days, 2024

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Use of Lithuanian singular nouns in plural forms: lexicalization and terminization

Studies about Languages, 2022

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Jonas Stepsys

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