Factors considered and ignored in plural acquisition: Frequency rules?

Abstract

Several models of regularities behind plural overgeneralization patterns of four-year-old monolingual Germans and bi-/multilingual children acquiring German were empirically examined within the framework of single- and dual-route models. The factors taken into account were frequency, cue validity, productivity, and iconicity of plural allomorphs. In this large-scale cross-sectional study, the results of 893 children tested with a modified, validated version of the speech and language screeningMSSand of 476 children tested with a validated language testSETK 3-5were analyzed. For all overgeneralization models, paired groups of expected and not expected answers were compared in the Wilcoxon test. At the early stages of plural acquisition the frequency of plural allomorphs and the simplest phonetic–phonologically based regularities seem to be the crucial factors recognized by children acquiring German. Gender-based plural allomorph frequency was associated with advanced German skills. These findings support the single-route theory with its emphasis on the influence of input characteristics on children’s error patterns. No evidence was found for a default status of -sor any other plural marker, and hence for the dual-route theory.

A blend of MaLT : Selected contributions from the Methods and Linguistic Theories Symposium 2015

“…All three markers (-s, -(e)n, -e) are iconic, productive, and the latter two are also the most frequent ones in Modern High German (Zaretsky et al 2011). All three markers do not require umlauting, which allows to avoid (potentially wrong) modifications of the stems of unknown words.…”

“…We hypothesized that German adults would prefer plural markers -s, -(e)n, and -e (all three without umlaut), both with rhyming and nonrhyming nonce nouns; the first one because of its high compatibility with borrowings including many "non-rhyme" neologisms (i.e. neologisms without clear phonotactic analogies in German) and with wordfinal phonemes, the latter two because of their high frequency in Modern High German (Zaretsky et al 2011). These three plural markers are characteristic of the answers of German preschoolers in nonce words tasks (Zaretsky et al 2013a(Zaretsky et al , 2013b.…”

“…Although Modern High German differentiates between nouns of masculine and neuter gender, with somewhat different pluralization patterns, the current study followed the design of Marcus et al (1995) with respect to non-differentiation between these two genders. It was predicted that -(e)n would occur more often with nouns of feminine gender, whereas -e and probably also -er would be used with nouns of non-feminine gender because such tendencies are typical of Modern High German (Mugdan 1977;Zaretsky et al 2011;Zaretsky & Lange 2014). These tendencies were indeed found in cross-tables and confirmed by very stable significance values in the regressions (Table 1).…”

Processing of noun plural marking in German-speaking children: an eye-tracking study

“…The plural marking system is much less complicated in Dutch, and accuracy of plural marking was unsurprisingly higher in Dutch-speaking children. Finally, Zaretsky et al (2013Zaretsky et al ( , 2016 showed different types of overgeneralization patterns in children who spoke German as an L1 (i.e., preference for -s suffixes) or as an L2 (i.e., preference for -n suffixes and zero forms). Children with German as an L1 further tended to use only the -s suffix to mark plural on non-words, when adults tended to use both -s and -n suffixes in the same task.…”