Clahsen H, Rothweiler M, Woest A, Marcus G F
Department of Linguistics, University of Düsseldorf, Germany.
Cognition. 1992 Dec;45(3):225-55. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(92)90018-d.
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.
在本文中，我们研究德语名词复数的习得，这与儿童如何表征规则和不规则屈折变化的问题相关。平克和普林斯（1992）已证明英语过去时系统中规则和不规则屈折变化之间存在若干分离现象。然而，在英语中，-ed的默认地位与其高频性相混淆；因此，必须研究除英语过去时构成之外的屈折变化系统。德语中的名词复数系统特别有趣，因为德语中大多数名词都有不规则复数形式，且规则（默认）复数形式的使用频率低于几种不规则复数形式。因此，尚不清楚语言学习者如何确定德语是否甚至有规则复数形式，如果有的话，其形式是什么。基于来自有语言障碍和无语言障碍的单语德语儿童的纵向数据，我们发现了一个显著的、具有统计学意义的相关性：在过度规则化中使用的复数词缀，即-n或-s，在复合词中被省略。这种相关性表明，即使是有语言障碍的儿童也对规则和不规则形态之间的区别敏感。我们根据基帕尔斯基（1982，1985）的层级排序模型以及对词缀的附加排序条件，对这种相关性提出一种语言学分析：默认（规则）词缀不能作为复合过程的输入。
