Speeded production of inflected words in children and adults

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis study examines the production of regular and irregular participle forms of German with high and low frequencies using a speeded production task. 40 children in two age groups (five-to seven-year olds, eleven-to twelve-year olds) and 35 adult native speakers of German listened to stem forms of verbs presented in a sentential context and were asked to produce corresponding participle forms as quickly and accurately as possible. Dependent variables were the subjects' participle-production latencies and error rates. We found contrasts between the production of regular and irregular forms in both children and adults, with respect to the production latencies and types of morphological error. Children overapplied the regular patterns to forms that are irregular in the adult language, but not vice versa. High-frequency irregular participles were produced faster (and amongst the children more accurately) than low-frequency ones, whereas regular participles yielded a reverse frequency effect, i.e. longer production latencies for high-frequency forms than for low-frequency ones, in the two groups of children as well as in one subgroup of adults. We explain these findings from the perspective of dual-mechanism models of inflection arguing that the mental mechanisms and representations for processing morphologically complex words (' words ' and 'rules ') are the same in children and adults, and that the observed child/adult differences in [*] The research in this paper has been supported by a German Science Foundation grant to HC (SFB282/C7). We thank Axel Huth, Rebecca Groß, and Peter Prü fert, for assistance in designing, administering and analysing the experiments, Ricardo Russo and Phil Scholfield for detailed statistical advice, and Claudia Felser, Ingrid Sonnenstuhl, and two anonymous JCL reviewers for comments and helpful suggestions.

Producing morphologically complex words: An ERP study with children and adults

“…This contrast suggests that irregular English past tense forms are accessed as full forms during production while regulars are composed from their component parts. The speeded production task has also been used to study morphological encoding in children (e.g., Clahsen et al, 2004;Fleischhauer and Clahsen, 2012). Testing 5-to 12-year-old children in different age groups on inflected verb forms of German, an advantage for highover low-frequency irregular forms was found in all participant groups, parallel to the findings on the English past tense.…”

Three factors in language variation

“…The other test concerns the formation of past participles in German, where the default rule is to use the -t suf x and there is an unpredictable set of irregulars that add -n. Despite the low type frequency of -n verbs, "add -t" and "add -n" classes are comparable in rule frequency. In an online production study, Clahsen et al (2004) nd that when stem frequency is controlled for, the regular "add -t" class is slower than the irregular classes, at least for words in the higher frequency region which normally constitute the basis for productivity calculation during language acquisition. These pieces of evidence, along with the treatment of frequency effects among exceptions, provide empirical support for the processing model motivated by the Elsewhere Condition (10).…”

Recognition of gated verbs by children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment: Effects of inflection and frequency

“…The answer depends on whether one assumes that inflected forms are stored in the lexicon, and there is much debate over this (e.g. Clahsen, Hadler, & Weyerts, 2004;Pinker & Ullman, 2002;Stemberger & MacWhinney, 1986). There is evidence that G-SLI children store regular past tense forms but that typically developing children, at least from the age of six, do not.…”