Variation in the Acquisition of German Plural Morphology by Second Language Learners

Wegener, Heide

doi:10.1515/9783111634777.267

Cited by 10 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Firma -Firmas or Firmen 'firm, business,' Diva -Diven 'diva'). The so called schwa-drop or schwa-deletion rule (Wegener, 1994) is one of the simplest plural rules in German. It does not allow a plural suffix to contain a schwa where the final word syllable also contains a schwa.…”

Section: Plurality In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This can be seen in recently borrowed or not yet integrated foreign words, proper names, abbreviations, nonce or onomatopoetic words, and other nouns which do not evoke associations with acquired German words or plural patterns (Bartke et al, 1995) and are considered to be phonologically or lexically conspicuous, or both. Such nouns are classified as not normal language material by Wegener (1994): LKWs 'trucks,' Frankfurts, Warums 'whys,' Altmanns 'the Altmanns.' Those conspicuous, marked nouns are believed to be at the opposite end of the more usual, unmarked nouns with their prototype consisting of two or more syllables, ending in a schwa or schwa plus consonant, or some derivational suffix.…”

Section: Plurality In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Comparative studies of dysgrammatically speaking or other linguistically impaired German children and correctly speaking control subjects have also been extensively conducted (Schoeler, Illichmann, & Kany, 1989;Veit, 1986). In these studies, however, sample sizes ranged mostly from only 10 to 20 participants (Clahsen, Rothweiler, Woest, & Marcus, 1992;Korecky-Kröll & Dressler, 2009;Szagun, 2001;Wegener, 1994). Only few studies report sample sizes larger than 30 (e.g., Schaner-Wolles, 1989.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Several studies (Marouani, 2006;Wegener, 1994) on plural acquisition in bilingual children have recently been published which mostly opted for case studies or longitudinal designs. The results might thus be of heuristic, but not of parametric value.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of German pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children

Zaretsky

Lange

Euler

et al. 2013

SSLLT

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Existing studies on plural acquisition in German have relied on small samples and thus hardly deliver generalizable and differentiated results. Here, overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs and other tendencies in the acquisition of German plural markers are described on the basis of test data from 7,394 3-to 5-yearold monolingual German and bi/multilingual immigrant children tested with a modified, validated version of the Marburger Sprachscreening (MSS) language test and 476 children tested with the SETK 3-5 language test. Classified correct and wrong answers to MSS and SETK 3-5 plural items were compared. The acquisition patterns of immigrants corresponded to those of younger German children. Both monolingual German and immigrant children demonstrated generally the same universal frequency and phonetically/phonologically based error patterns, irre-

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Section: Plurality In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Plurality In Germanmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquisition of German pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children

Zaretsky

Lange

Euler

et al. 2013

SSLLT

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“…Parodi et al 2004). On the other hand, in Wegener's (1994) study of the second language acquisition of the German plural system by children with Turkish, Russian, or Polish as L1, it is shown that the first language does indeed indirectly influence the acquisitional process. It is assumed that the prior linguistic knowledge serves as a background against which the target system is analyzed and processed.…”

Section: Proposal For a Combined Modelmentioning

confidence: 97%

Source- and product-oriented strategies in L2 acquisition of plural marking in German

Köpcke

Wecker

2016

Morphology

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This article deals with the acquisition of the German plural system. It raises the question how morphologically complex words are represented in the mental grammar and in the lexicon of children and how this representation emerges.There are several theoretical accounts dealing with this question. These accounts are basically of two kinds. One approach models the German number system as rulebased; i.e. source-oriented rules are postulated that operate on the singular form of the noun. The second approach is schema-based. Essential to this approach is the idea that speakers form the plural of a given noun according to prototypical plural shapes. Empirical evidence can be found for both approaches, but neither of them seems to be able to fully explain acquisitional paths on its own.On the basis of the analysis of acquisitional data, this article argues for an expanded schema account that embraces both source-and product-oriented mechanisms. We propose an acquisition model according to which learners start out with storing plural forms holistically in an associative network; then they abstract productoriented schemas from these stored forms that focus on the typical gestalts of German plural forms. In a last step, they establish source-oriented schemas that relate singular schemas with plural schemas.The data for this study were gathered in a nonce word elicitation experiment from children aged 6 to 10 learning German either as their native or second language. In the latter case, the children's L1 was either Russian or Turkish.

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Learning a morphological system without a default: the Polish genitive

Dąbrowska

2001

J. Child Lang.

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The acquisition of the English past tense inflection is the paradigm example of rule learning in the child language literature and has become something of a test case for theories of language development. This is unfortunate, as the idiosyncratic properties of the English system of marking tense make it a rather unrepresentative example of morphological development. In this paper, I contrast this familiar inflection with a much more complex morphological subsystem, the Polish genitive. The genitive case has three different markers, each restricted to a different subset of nouns, in both the singular and the plural. Analysis of the spontanous speech of three children between the ages of  ; and  ; showed that they generalized, and overgeneralized, all three singular endings. However, error rates were extremely low and there is no evidence that they treated any one ending as the ' default '. The genitive plural, on the other hand, showed a strikingly different pattern of acquisition, similar to that seen in English-speaking children learning the past tense. It is argued that in the latter two cases, the default-like character of one of the affixes is attributable to the properties of the relevant inflectional subsystems, not to the predispositions that children bring to the language-learning task. :    For most linguists, it is axiomatic that lexical and grammatical knowledge are distinct aspects of a speaker 's competence. The lexicon is finite, whereas the number of complex units (inflected forms, phrases, and sentences) that a speaker can produce and understand is in principle infinite. Furthermore, the relationship between a word and its referent is arbitrary and hence un-[*] I would like to thank Magdalena

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Variation in the Acquisition of German Plural Morphology by Second Language Learners

Cited by 10 publications

References 8 publications

Acquisition of German pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children

Acquisition of German pluralization rules in monolingual and multilingual children

Source- and product-oriented strategies in L2 acquisition of plural marking in German

Learning a morphological system without a default: the Polish genitive

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