Developing biases

Abstract

German nouns may alternate from singular to plural in two different ways. Some singular forms that end in a voiceless obstruent have a plural in which this obstruent is voiced. Another alternation concerns the vowel. Some singular forms with a back vowel have a plural form in which this back vowel is front. For each noun it has to be established individually whether it alternates or not. The voicing alternation is phonetically grounded, but the vowel alternation is not. Knowledge about such alternations involves two things. First, it involves knowledge of which words alternate and which words do not and second, it involves the ability to extend the alternations to novel words. We studied the knowledge of which words alternate and the proportion to which they alternate in two corpus studies. We studied the knowledge of speakers concerning which words alternate and what generalizations can be based upon these words by means of a production study. The production study involved words and nonces. We asked twenty 5 year-olds, twenty 7 year-olds, and ten adults to produce the plural for a given singular word and a plural for a given singular nonce. In the corpus study we found that both alternations occur with the same frequency. In the production of alternations in words we found that participants in all age groups make few mistakes. With respect to the production of alternations in nonce words, we found that the proportion of voicing alternations decreases with age, while the proportion of vowel alternations increases. We explain this change in the ability to generalize the alternations to nonces on the basis of the confidence speakers can have in a generalization. Young children have a small lexicon and they can form relatively unreliable generalizations on lexical distributions. They are, however, proficient users of language and have great phonetic experience. They can more confidently form generalizations on the basis of this experience. Adults have a large lexicon and, as a consequence, they can confidently form generalizations based on their lexicon. In addition, they know that many alternations are not based on phonetic considerations.

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

“…The present findings raise an important methodological point. To investigate morphological production, studies use wug tests in which one form is used in order to make a participant produce another form (Berko-Gleason, 1958;van de Vijver & Baer-Henney, 2014). In addition to being a very meta-linguistic task, this method may leave participants stumped in case of languages such as Maltese.…”

Acquisition of nominal morphophonological alternations in Russian

“…As predicted on the basis of evidence from Russian (Ceytlin, 2000, 2006) and Dutch (Zamuner et al, 2011), at the age of 4 children do not yet show systematic sensitivity to nominal morphophonological patterns. The process of morphophonological development is likely to be additionally influenced by children’s vocabulary size (van de Vijver & Baer-Henney, 2014). Thus, in Figures 1 and 2 we observe that only at the age of 5 did the children in this study start treating real and nonce words differently, suggesting that children below that age do not yet have enough experience in using these forms to make generalisations about the morphophonological patterns.…”

Second language learning of phonological alternations with and without orthographic input: Evidence from the acquisition of a German-like voicing alternation

“…While some researchers report that certain morphophonemic alternations are acquired relatively early (e.g., vowel harmony in the accusative suffix in Turkish, Aksu-Koç, & Slobin, 1985; vowel and consonant alternations in Northern Saami, Bals, 2004;vowel alternations in European Portuguese, Fikkert & Freitas, 2006), others have claimed that adult-like mastery does not emerge until relatively late (Pierrehumbert, 2003). A number of factors, such as phonetic grounding, frequency, locality, amount of exposure, and knowledge of abstract features, have been shown to influence the acquisition process and generalization behavior (Baer-Henney & van de Vijver, 2012;Cristia & Seidl, 2008;van de Vijver & Baer-Henney, 2014;Wilson, 2006). Buckler and Fikkert (2016) investigated how voicing alternations are represented in the lexicon of Dutch and German 3-year-olds.…”