Abstract (eng)
On the basis of large longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of two Viennese children (the boy Jan, aged 1;3 to 6;0, and the girl Katharina, aged 1;6 to 3;0) and their mothers, this study investigates the acquisition of the most important categories of German noun morphology (gender, number, case, diminutive formation, compounding, prefixation, suffixation, conversion, and implicit derivation) within the framework of Naturalness Theory.
Results show general preferences for more natural categories and largely confirm the predictions of Natural Morphology.
The following inter-individual differences appear: The early talker Jan, who adopts a segmental acquisition strategy, first prefers plural and case markings on nouns, whereas the late talker Katharina, who has a more prosodic approach, first uses determiners as gender, number and case markers.
As gender is an opaque category with many syncretisms, both children start with a chaotic gender system. Whereas Katharina’s recordings end up before gender can said to be acquired, Jan masters the Natural Gender Rule from 2;6 onwards, and almost all of his remaining gender errors can be explained by semantic or phonological overgeneralizations.
Within the category of number, the local variety seems to have an impact on the children’s plural overgeneralizations: Due to several dialectal phenomena, the zero plural has a wide scope in Viennese German and is therefore often overgeneralized by children. There is no evidence for a regular default -s plural because -n and -e overgeneralizations also occur frequently and point to several subregularities within the German plural system. But the zero plural can at least be regarded as an emergency plural used by Viennese children and adults when they are not able to retrieve a certain existing plural form.
Case marking in Viennese German has also some special characteristics which make it difficult to acquire (e.g. accusatives and datives are not always clearly differentiated even in adult language).
Among diminutives, mainly -i hypocoristics of proper names are relatively frequent in both corpora, and first pragmatic contrasts of diminutives and their corresponding simplex nouns emerge as early as 1;9 (in Jan) and 2;0 (in Katharina). As the most natural category of German word formation, compounds are used productively by both children very early. Especially Jan, who discovers compounding about different car names from 1;8 onwards, soon produces many neologisms and ad-hoc compounds. Katharina’s first compounds are forms with possessive meaning (e.g. Opa+auto ‘granddad car’ at 2;1).
While noun prefixation is extremely rare in German and is not used productively up to age 6, suffixation is acquired much earlier: In particular, the -er suffix of instrument and agent nouns becomes productive from 1;9 onwards and also appears in neologisms. Rare and foreign suffixes nevertheless remain rote-learned.
Morphological and syntactic conversion and implicit derivation are investigated separately, but within the same chapter. While implicit derivations are unproductive and always rote-learned, morphological conversions show some rare overgeneralizations, and syntactic infinitive and adjective conversions also become productive from 2;0 onwards.
A statistical comparison of all categories yields significant correlations between more than half of the categories and shows that children are highly sensitive to the distributions in their mothers’ inputs, which favors a usage-based acquisition approach also compatible with the model of Pre- and Protomorphology in language acquisition.