Inflectional rules in children’s grammars: evidence from German participles

Abstract

In recent studies on the acquisition of inflectional morphology in English much debate has centred around the question whether children’s overregularization errors, such as goed instead of went result from a morphological rule or from a connectionist network such as the one suggested by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986). Pinker and Prince (1992) and Marcus et al. (1992) have argued that the -ed affix has the status of a symbolic rule in the children’s grammars which is qualitatively distinct from an associative memory for irregulars. However, researchers such as Marchman and Bates (1991) and MacWhinney and Leinbach (1992) have disputed the existence of such symbolic rules and suggested that overregularizations are effects of associative networks: In English, the -ed affix has much higher type frequencies than the irregular past tense forms, and is therefore preferred in children’s inflectional errors.

The research in this paper is supported by German Science Foundation grants Cl 97/5-1 and Cl 97/1.1–1.2 to Harald Clahsen, and grant Wu 86/9.1–9.4 to Dieter Wunderlich and Harald Clahsen. We also acknowledge the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the German Academic Exchange Council (DAAD) for a grant jointly given to Steven Pinker (MIT) and Harald Clahsen for collaborative work on the acquisition of inflection. We thank the members of our research group, in particular Andreas Woest and Jutta Pollmann, for their contributions. We are also grateful to Heather van der Lely, Gary Marcus, Steven Pinker and Richard Wiese as well as to audiences at the 16th Boston University Conference on Language Development (Oct. 1991), at the University of Tübingen (Oct. 1991) and the European Group of Child Language Disorders, Lund, Sweden (May 1992) for comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper. Please address comments to Harald Clahsen, Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Düsseldorf, 4000 Düsseldorf, FRG, e-mail: clahsen@ze8.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de, or to Monika Rothweiler, Universität Bremen, Fachbereich 11, Postfach 330440, 2800 Bremen 33, FRG, e-mail: lø7a@zfu.uni-bremen.de.