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Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2006

SABINE LAAHA ,
DORIT RAVID ,
KATHARINA KORECKY-KRÖLL ,
GREGOR LAAHA  and
WOLFGANG U. DRESSLER
SABINE LAAHA
Affiliation:
Austrian Academy of Sciences
DORIT RAVID
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University, Israel
KATHARINA KORECKY-KRÖLL
Affiliation:
Austrian Academy of Sciences
GREGOR LAAHA
Affiliation:
Boku Vienna
WOLFGANG U. DRESSLER
Affiliation:
Vienna University
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Abstract

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e +U, -er +U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , May 2006 , pp. 271 - 302
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to the children who took part in our study, to their families, and to the staff of the kindergartens where the study was conducted. We would also like to thank two anonymous JCL reviewers for comments and helpful suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the IX International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Madison, July 16–21, 2002. This study was supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and by the Austrian Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung FWF (P 17276-G03).