Pizzas, pizzen, pizze: frequency, iconicity, cue validity, and productivity in the plural acquisition of German pre-schoolers (original) (raw)
Acquisition of German pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children
Existing studies on plural acquisition in German have relied on small samples and thus hardly deliver generalizable and differentiated results. Here, overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs and other tendencies in the acquisition of German plural markers are described on the basis of test data from 7,394 3-to 5-yearold monolingual German and bi/multilingual immigrant children tested with a modified, validated version of the Marburger Sprachscreening (MSS) language test and 476 children tested with the SETK 3-5 language test. Classified correct and wrong answers to MSS and SETK 3-5 plural items were compared. The acquisition patterns of immigrants corresponded to those of younger German children. Both monolingual German and immigrant children demonstrated generally the same universal frequency and phonetically/phonologically based error patterns, irre-552 spective of their linguistic background, but with different tendencies such as overgeneralization of -s by German children only.
Meaning matters in children’s plural productions
Cognition, 2008
The English plural is about the number of individuals in a set of like kinds. Two year old children use the plural but do not do so in all obligatory contexts. The present report asks whether the limitations on their use of the plural in any way related to meaning. Experiment 1 elicited plural productions from 2-year olds (n=26) for sets of size two and four and for instances of basic level categories that were either similar or identical. Children were much more likely to produce the plural of these well known nouns when there were four rather than two and when the instances were identical rather than merely similar. Experiment 2 examined spontaneous productions of parents speech to two-year-olds (n = 16). They showed a comparable similarity effect, but not a number effect. The results provide new evidence on children's acquisition of the English plural, showing that children's early productions are not just limited by knowledge of the noun and its plural form but also is limited by properties of the labeled sets in ways that are relevant to the underlying meaning of the plural.
Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2014
This study analyses the emergence of the noun plural category in typically developing Danish-speaking children from its first appearance up to the age of 10 years, focusing on the impact of sound structure and input frequency. We use a multi-method research approach comparing different data types (dictionary data, naturalistic spontaneous child language input and output, semi-naturalistic/semi-experimental data, experimental data and reported data). We define cross-linguistically three degrees of stem changes (no change, prosodic change, phonemic change), and we also define three degrees of productivity of plural markers (which combine stem change and suffix). Noun plurals emerge from an early age, typically around the second birthday, but the acquisition is still underway at the age of ten years. Plural acquisition is affected by frequency and morphophonological category. Danish children produce more correct plural stems of nouns with non-changing plural stems compared to plural no...
Phonological Constraints on Children’s Use of the Plural
The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural or past tense suffixes, is generally assumed to reflect mastery of the relevant morphological process. An alternate view holds that the use of an affix reflects not only morphological competence, but also additional factors including syntactic, semantic and phonological abilities. The present paper reports on a set of experiments in support of this latter view specifically examining the role of phonology on Englishspeaking children’s ability to produce the plural. Plural productions were elicited from two-year-olds for nouns with different codas, or endings (e.g. dogs vs. keys). The results provide evidence that the production of the plural morpheme –s is partly governed by children’s developing ability to articulate or perceive the phonological form of the plural. This supports a model of language learning in which the acquisition of different components of grammar interact with each other versus a model that is exclusively modular.
7 Variable vs. consistent input: comprehension of plural morphology and verbal agreement in children
Merging Features, 2009
This chapter presents an experimental study that tests Chilean and Mexican children's comprehension of nominal plural morphology and subject-verb agreement. The main results of the study are that children exposed to reliable input associate the plural morpheme to an interpretation of ‘more than one’ by at least four years of age, while children exposed to variable and unreliable input are delayed in their comprehension of plural morphology. Instead, these children rely on subject-verb agreement when assigning number to nouns. The results of this research strongly indicate that variable and unreliable input delays the acquisition of grammatical morphology that is affected by that variability.
The Role of Phonology in Children's Acquisition of the Plural
Language Acquisition, 2011
The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic and phonological abilities. The present paper reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of plural forms for both production and comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2 plural productions were elicited from eighty two-year-old children for nouns with codas with varying phonological properties. The results provide evidence that production of the plural morpheme is partly governed by the complexity of the coda and its sonority. Experiments 3 and 4 show that these constraints on codas also hold for comprehension as well, suggesting this effect is not simply articulatory, but also impacts the morphophonology of the plural.
This paper presents some results of a study on the acquisition of German plural morphology. The error patterns of children and the adult control group reveal that the acquisition of plural morphology is conditioned in a predictable manner by a) the phonotactic shape of the noun stem and b) the gender of the noun. An acquisition model is proposed that takes this fact into account and also predicts the acquisition process with possible and impossible errors. It is based on the observation that errors demonstrate in a predictable way what children use as cues for acquisition. It not only explains the fact that adults have similar problems forming plurals from new nouns but also which errors adults and children are likely to exhibit.
Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default
Journal of Child Language, 2006
The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2; 6 to 6 ; 0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e +U, -er [*] We are grateful to the children who took part in our study, to their families, and to the staff of the kindergartens where the study was conducted. We would also like to thank two anonymous JCL reviewers for comments and helpful suggestions.
When do children generalize the plural to novel nouns?
2007
Abstract Despite the theoretical importance of the processes of generalization to the development of morphological rules, not much is known about the basic developmental trend or the relevant processes. The present study seeks to answer the question: at what age are children able to generalize the plural to new nouns.