Abstract
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, irrespective of their linguistic background, but with different tendencies such as overgeneralization of -s by German children only.
Highlights
The highly complicated plural system of modern High German is a longstanding battleground for the proponents of different grammar acquisition models stressing different constellations of factors, such as frequency, applicability, iconicity, and transparency, which influence mental processing and encoding of the plural forms (Köpcke, 1988; Korecky-Kröll & Dressler, 2009; Mugdan, 1977; Park, 1977; Veit, 1986)
The present study addresses the following questions: 1. Which plural acquisition and error patterns are characteristic of 4-yearold monolingual and bi/multilingual children?
The discrepancies in the distribution of plural markers in the error patterns in Marburger Sprachscreening (MSS) between 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, and between 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds were not significant according to crosstable chi-square tests; all ps >
Summary
The highly complicated plural system of modern High German is a longstanding battleground for the proponents of different grammar acquisition models stressing different constellations of factors, such as frequency, applicability, iconicity, and transparency, which influence mental processing and encoding of the plural forms (Köpcke, 1988; Korecky-Kröll & Dressler, 2009; Mugdan, 1977; Park, 1977; Veit, 1986). Comparative studies of dysgrammatically speaking or other linguistically impaired German children and correctly speaking control subjects have been extensively conducted (Schoeler, Illichmann, & Kany, 1989; Veit, 1986). In these studies, sample sizes ranged mostly from only 10 to participants Korecky-Kröll and Dressler (2009) found almost no traces of s-overgeneralization (-s used instead of other suffixes) in the data of the only child in their study This led to the conclusion that the dualroute model regarding -s as the default plural marker should be wrong, which fits with the authors’ preference for the single-route models. Samples are needed in order to specify, for example, effects of age and of foreign languages spoken at home on plural acquisition
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