Helping a crocodile to learn German plurals: Children’s online judgment of actual, potential and illegal plural forms

A substantial tradition of linguistic inquiry has framed the knowledge of native speakers in terms of their ability to determine the grammatical acceptability of language forms that they encounter for the first time. In the domain of morphology, the productivity framework of Dressler (CLASNET Working papers 7, 1997) has emphasized the importance of this ability in terms of the graded potentiality of non-existing multimorphemic forms. The goal of this study was to investigate what role the notion of potentiality plays in online lexical well-formedness judgment among children who are native speakers of Austrian German. A total of 114 children between the ages of six and ten and a total of 40 adults between the ages of 18 and 30 (as a comparison group) participated in an online well-formedness judgment task which focused on pluralized German nouns. Concrete, picturable, high frequency German nouns were presented in three pluralized forms: (a) actual existing plural form, (b) morphologically illegal plural form, (c) potential (but not existing) plural form. Participants were shown pictures of the nouns (as a set of three identical items) and simultaneously heard one of three pluralized forms for each noun. Response latency and judgment type served as dependent variables. Results indicate that both children and adults are sensitive to the distinction between illegal and potential forms (neither of which they would have encountered). For all participants, plural frequency (rather than frequency of the singular form) affected responses for both existing and non-existing words. Other factors increasing acceptability were the presence of supplementary umlaut in addition to suffixation and homophony with existing words or word forms

The role of explicit contrast in adjective acquisition: a cross-linguistic longitudinal study of adjective production in spontaneous child speech and parental input

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age. </jats:p

Morphological blind-alley developments as a theoretical challenge to both usage-based and nativist acquisition models

In this paper we want to challenge two leading acquisitionist approaches or model types, namely usage-based and nativist models, and argue in favour of a constructivist model of autopoiesis. Our area of investigation is morphology in its major components inflection, derivation and compounding. The data are longitudinal production data of everyday mother-child interactions. First, we formulate a general challenge to usage-based approaches. We then sketch our general account in terms of Natural Morphology and claim that this account cannot be transformed into, or be substituted by, an existing nativist account based on published claims about Universal Grammar. We end by discussing in detail the nine phenomena observed in early Greek, German, French and Russian acquisition data and give an account in terms of self-organisation and Natural Morphology. © 2019 Pacini Editore S.p.A.. All rights reserved