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      Acquisition of German Noun Plurals in Typically Developing Children and Children with Specific Language Impairment

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      Child Development Research
      Hindawi Limited

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          Abstract

          The present study investigates the acquisition of plural markers in German children with and without language impairments using an elicitation task. In the first cross-sectional study, 60 monolingual children between three and six years of age were tested. The results show significant improvements starting at the age of five. Plural forms which require a vowel change (umlaut) but no overt suffix were most challenging for all children. With regard to their error patterns, the typically developing children preferably overapplied the suffix -e to monosyllabic stems and added -s to stems ending in a trochee. Though the children made errors in plural markings, the prosodic structures of pluralized nouns were kept legitimate. In the second study, the production of plural markers in eight children with SLI was compared to age-matched and MLU-matched controls. Children with SLI performed at the level of the MLU-matched controls, showing subtle differences with regard to their error patterns, and their preferences in addition and substitution errors: In contrast to their typically developing peers, children with SLI preferred the frequent suffix -n in their overapplications, suggesting that they strongly rely on frequency-based cues. The findings are discussed from a morphophonological perspective.

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          Comparison of a single case to a control or normative sample in neuropsychology: development of a Bayesian approach.

          Frequentist methods are available for comparison of a patient's test score (or score difference) to a control or normative sample; these methods also provide a point estimate of the percentage of the population that would obtain a more extreme score (or score difference) and, for some problems, an accompanying interval estimate (i.e., confidence limits) on this percentage. In the present paper we develop a Bayesian approach to these problems. Despite the very different approaches, the Bayesian and frequentist methods yield equivalent point and interval estimates when (a) a case's score is compared to that of a control sample, and (b) when the raw (i.e., unstandardized) difference between a case's scores on two tasks are compared to the differences in controls. In contrast, the two approaches differ with regard to point estimates of the abnormality of the difference between a case's standardized scores. The Bayesian method for standardized differences has the advantages that (a) it can directly evaluate the probability that a control will obtain a more extreme difference score, (b) it appropriately incorporates error in estimating the standard deviations of the tasks from which the patient's difference score is derived, and (c) it provides a credible interval for the abnormality of the difference between an individual's standardized scores; this latter problem has failed to succumb to frequentist methods. Computer programs that implement the Bayesian methods are described and made available.
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            Word-Learning by Preschoolers With Specific Language Impairment

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              Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals.

              In this paper we study the acquisition of German noun plurals in relation to the question of how children represent regular and irregular inflection. Pinker and Prince (1992) have demonstrated several dissociations between regular and irregular inflection in the English past tense system. However, in English, the default status of -ed is confounded with its high frequency; therefore inflectional systems other than English past tense formation must be examined. The noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes. Based on longitudinal data from impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children, we find a striking, statistically significant correlation: plural affixes that are used in overregularizations, namely -n or -s, are left out within compounds. This correlation shows that even impaired children are sensitive to the distinction between regular and irregular morphology. We propose a linguistic analysis of the correlation in terms of Kiparsky's (1982, 1985) level-ordering model plus an additional ordering condition on affixes: default (regular) affixes cannot serve as input to compounding processes.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Child Development Research
                Child Development Research
                Hindawi Limited
                2090-3987
                2090-3995
                2011
                2011
                : 2011
                :
                : 1-17
                Article
                10.1155/2011/718925
                c34f3c63-6eb6-4778-b5eb-e0d5cb976385
                © 2011

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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