The acquisition of German noun plurals was examined on the basis of two-hour spontaneous speech samples from 6 children between 1;4 and 3;8 recorded every 5-6 weeks, and from 15 children recorded every 20 weeks. Adult speech was also sampled. Onset of use of plural forms was early, with variation in individual growth rates of type frequencies. Children used the different German plural markings from early on. Growth rates of type frequencies per different plural class corresponded to adult frequencies, with -n and -e plurals displaying fastest growth. At age 2;10 relative type frequencies per plural class differed from adult use, but not at age 3;8. Errors were produced from the beginning, with high error rates. Major error types, -n, -s, partial marking, and no marking did not differ in frequencies. Error patterns reflected the regularities of the German plural marking system.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Augst, E. (1979). Neuere Forschungen zur Substantivflexion [Recent research on noun inflection]. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik, 7, 220-32.
2.
Bartke, S. ( 1998). Experimentelle Studien zur Flexion und Wortbildung [Experimental studies on inflection and word formation] ( Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag).
3.
Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: a multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Brain and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Research, 22, 991-1060.
4.
Clahsen, H., Rothweiler, M., Woest, A. & Marcus, G. (1992). Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals. Cognition, 45, 225-55.
5.
Duden (1995). Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache, Band 4 (Grammar of contemporary German, Vol. 4), 5th edn (Mannheim: Dudenverlag).
6.
Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (London: Bradford ).
7.
Ewers, H. (1999). Schemata im mentalen Lexikon: empirische Untersuchungen zum Erwerb der deutschen Pluralbildung [Schemata in the mental lexicon: empirical studies on the acquisition of German plural formation]. In J. Meibauer & M. Rothweiler (eds), Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb [The lexicon in language acquisition] (Berlin: Francke), 106-27.
8.
Fenson, L., Dale, P., Reznick, J.S., Bates, E., Thal, D. & Pethick, S. (1994). Variability in early communicative development . Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 59 (5).
9.
Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I. (1994). How do children cope with variation in the input? The case of German plurals and compounding. In R. Tracey (ed.), How Tolerant is Universal Grammar? Essays on Language Learnability and Language Variation (Tübingen : Niemeyer), 225-66.
10.
Gravetter, F.J. & Wallnau, L.B. (1996). Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, 4 edn (Minneapolis: West).
11.
Hahn, U. (1999). The dual-route account of German: where it is not a schema theory, it is probably wrong. Commentary on Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: a multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Brain and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Research, 22, 1024-5.
12.
Indefrey, P. ( 1999). Some problems with the lexical status of nondefault inflection. Commentary on Clahsen , H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: a multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Brain and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Research, 22, 1025.
13.
Köpcke, K.-M. (1988). Schemas in German plural formation. Lingua, 74, 303-35.
14.
MacWhinney, B. ( 1978). The acquisition of morphophonology. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 43.
15.
— (1987). The competition model. In B. MacWhinney (ed.), Mechanisms of Language Learning (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum), 249-308.
16.
— (1995). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum ).
17.
Marcus, G., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R. & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: the exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189-256.
18.
Marcus, G., Ullman, U., Pinker, S., Hollander, J., Rosen, T. & Xu, F. ( 1992). Over-regularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57.
19.
Miller, W. & Ervin, S. (1964). The acquisition of language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29.
20.
Mugdan, J. (1977). Flexionsmorphologie und Psycholinguistik [Inflectional morphology and psycholinguistics] (Tübingen: Narr).
21.
Park, T.-Z. (1978). Plurals in child speech. Journal of Child Language, 5, 237-50.
22.
Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
23.
— (1991). Rules of language. Science, 253, 530-5.
24.
— (1999). Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson).
25.
Plunkett, K. & Juola, J. (1999). A connectionist model of English past tense and plural morphology. Cognitive Science,23, 463-90.
26.
Plunkett, K. & Marchman, V. ( 1993). From rote learning to system building: acquiring verb morphology in children and connectionist nets. Cognition , 48, 21-69.
27.
Rumelhart, D. & McClelland, J. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs: implicit rules or parallel distributed processing? In J. McClelland, D. Rumelhart & the PDP Research Group (eds), Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 216-71.
Sarimski, K. (1987). Ordinalskalen zur sensomotorischen Entwicklung [Ordinal scales of sensorimotor development] (Weinheim : Beltz); German version of Uzgiris, I. & Hunt, J. (1975). Assessment in Infancy: Ordinal Scales of Psychological Development (Champaign: University of Illinois Press ).
30.
Schöler, H., Fromm, W. & Kany, W. (1998). Spezifische Sprachentwicklungsstörung und Sprachlernen [Specific language impairment and language learning] ( Heidelberg: Edition Schindele).
31.
Stem, C. & Stem, W. (1928). Die Kindersprache [Children 's language] (Leipzig: Barth).
32.
Szagun, G. (1999). Rules for Transcribing and Analyzing German Child Language (Institut für Kognitionsforschung, University of Oldenburg, Germany).
33.
— (2000a). The acquisition of grammatical and lexical structures in children with cochlear implants: a developmental psycholinguistic approach . Audiology & Neuro-Otology, 5, 39-47.
34.
— ( 2000b). Learning the h(e)ard way: the acquisition of grammar in young German-speaking children with cochlear implants and with normal hearing . In Windsor, F., Kelly, L. & Newlett, N. (eds), Themes in Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics ( Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum).
35.
Wagner, K.R. (1985). How much do children say in a day? Journal of Child Language, 12, 475-87.
36.
Wurzel, W.U. (1984). Flexionsmorphologie und Natürlichkeit [Inflectional morphology and naturalness] (Berlin: Akademie Verlag).
