The acquisition of some Dutch morphological rules

Abstract

The acquisition of the morphological rules for plural, agentive, and diminutive suffixes in Dutch was studied. Subjects included 7- and 12-year-old native speakers, and second-language learners in three age groups (5–10 years, 12–18 years, and adult). The first- and second-language learners showed very similar orders of acquisition for the rule systems governing plural and diminutive, but the second-language learners showed a subtle form of interference from their first language in acquiring the agentive. The findings suggest that morphological acquisition proceeds piecemeal, with the learning of specific word ending + allomorph sequences, and that generalizations at the level of morphological rules may not be made even after several years of correct performance with the allomorph in question.

Acquiring diminutive allomorphs: taking item-specific characteristics into account

“…Note that they also found /ətjə/ to be less productive than initially expected even in adults. More recently Peelaerts (2008) confirmed the findings from the Snow et al (1979) and Den Os and Harder (1987) studies. She tested four-to ten-year-old children and also found that the lower the type frequency of the allomorph, the later it was acquired.…”

“…In the case of the English past tense, the /Id/ allomorph has the lowest type frequency and is also the least productive (Blom & Paradis, 2013;Blom et al, 2012;Marchman, 1997;Matthews & Theakston, 2006;Tomas et al, 2017a). As will be elaborated on in the next section, the few studies that have investigated the Dutch diminutive have also found that type frequencies of the different diminutive allomorphs affected production accuracies (Den Os & Harder, 1987;Peelaerts, 2008;Snow, Smith, & Hoefnagel-Höhle, 1979). In contrast, Rispens and de Bree (2014) did not find an effect of type frequency on production accuracies of the Dutch past tense in TD children and children with language impairment.…”

“…Our hypothesis was two-fold. Based on the morphophonological patterns for forming the diminutive, we hypothesised (Hypothesis 2a) lower production accuracies, relative to the other allomorphs, for /әtjә/ due to phonological complexity effects (see above), and /kjә/ and /pjә/ based on the relative low type frequencies of these two allomorphs (Den Os & Harder, 1987;Peelaerts, 2008;Snow et al, 1979). In addition, although /jə/ is based on the phonologically least complex stem characteristics and has the highest type frequency, based on its phonotactic frequency in combination with the final phoneme of the stem, children might also show difficulties with this allomorph (Hypothesis 2b).…”

Inflectional complexity and experience affect plural processing in younger and older readers of Dutch and German

“…Importantly, more recent research provided ample evidence that, in fact, both plural forms of Dutch should be considered regular (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997;Baayen et al, 2002;Keuleers et al, 2007;Van Wijk, 2002): clippings, nonce words, acronyms, onomatopoeic terms, proper names, and unassimilated borrowings may take -s or -en as the plural affix, depending on the phonological environment (particularly with regard to stress and sonority) created by the singular form. For instance, when participants in a study by Snow, Smith, and Hoefnagel-Höhle (1980) were asked to produce the plural of nonce words (e.g. flik, hinden), they used the phonologically appropriate affix ( flikken, hindens).…”

The Dutch plural landscape

“…(1) new words AE kepsen, flonkers (Snow et al, 1980) loanwords AE fezzen, ciabatta's acronyms AE HATten, PABOs (Baayen et al, to appear) names AE de van Wijken, de van Dijks If it turns out that Dutch has two default affixes, however, this is problematic for the dual model. The central criterion for the default in this model is the ability to attach to a stem without morphological or phonological conditions.…”