Compounding and inflection in German child language

9. The acquisition of German plurals

“…One way to deal with acquisition data is to assume inborn symbolic rules and parameters (Clahsen et al 1992(Clahsen et al , 1996, for instance). In such an approach, a However, we can understand the development, if we assume a single associative learning mechanism, the basic principle of network processing.…”

An ERP-study of German ‘irregular’ morphology

“…A unitary network model based on frequencies, on the other hand, cannot explain why language learners overgeneralise the -s affix, and also, why in judgment tasks plural forms with -s are preferred when applied to a nonce word, although the -s plural is the one with the lowest frequency in the lexicon (cf. Table 1; for details compare, among others, Bartke, 1998;Clahsen, Marcus, Bartke, & Wiese, 1996;Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, & Pinker, 1995;Niedeggen-Bartke, 1999;Sonnenstuhl-Henning, 2003). To date, the nature of German plural morphology seems to be captured best by the dual mechanism model (Pinker & Prince 1988.…”

“…Countings are based on the 1 Mio corpus. Different from Bartke (1998), Clahsen et al (1996), and Marcus et al (1995), compounds are also included in these countings. This leads to slightly different results, but the general tendency is preserved.…”

Yearbook of Morphology 1999

“…Marcus et al (1995) have argued that, despite its relative rarity, -s is the Plural suffix of last resort, used on non-nouns and nouns for which an alternative exponent of Plural is unavailable (e.g. .'…”