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

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.