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Acquisition of pronouns in L1 has often been used as a testing ground for postulates of linguistic theories. The present study approaches the subject differently, by contrastively studying the early acquisition of a specific set of pronouns in Croatian and Austrian German. The data were extracted from three children’s corpora of spontaneous language production for each language. The emergence and early production of specialised reflexive pronouns and reflexively used personal pronouns in the two languages were examined and compared with the emergence of non-reflexively used personal pronouns. The results have shown that reflexive and reflexively used pronouns emerge later and initially at a slower pace in child production in Austrian German than in Croatian. The same is true for the emergence of non-reflexively used personal pronouns in the oblique cases. No clear temporal precedence in child production was found for either reflexive/reflexively used or non-reflexively used personal pronouns. The differences found in the acquisition timeline between the two languages are accounted for by the differences between the two languages in terms of nature of the pronominals used as reflexive markers, distribution of reflexive and reflexively used pronouns in the CDS, and morphological richness.

German in Austria is claimed to be shaped by wide-spread dialect use and historical language contact. In this context, variation in prepositional phrases (PPs) is frequently cited, but still underresearched. Three linguistic variables are particularly interesting: (1) preposition choice (p-choice), (2) case marking in PPs and (3) preposition–determiner contractions. The present study aims at identifying linguistic and sociolinguistic – including regional – patterns of variation in the realization of PPs with two-way prepositions in German in Austria on the basis of natural production data including formal and informal registers from urban and rural adults of different age groups and different socioeconomic backgrounds living in Bavarian regions of Austria. The data were compared against the German standard variety from Germany to identify all constructions (possibly) specific for German in Austria. Results indicate that p-choice (particularly in directed motion constructions) shows mostly regional effects: South Bavarian varieties are characterized by preposition drop, whereas in the other regions, the preposition auf ‘on(to)’ seems overrepresented. However, case marking is more dependent on sociodemographic variables and accusative–dative syncretism appears more frequently in plural than in singular contexts. Finally, specific preposition–determiner contractions are widespread across all regions and groups investigated, even in (close-to-)standard registers.

The development of synthetic compounds with deverbal heads in German, namely nominalizations with ung (such as Kindererziehung ‘child education’) and the nominalized infinitive (such as Eierlegen ‘laying of eggs’) has not been studied for language acquisition, due to their late emergence and the poor documentation in later acquisition stages. The historical emergence of synthetic compounding has had little attention. Our aim is to bring together both ‘emergence-driven’ perspectives for investigating what formal properties of synthetic compounding can be observed from the perspective of the most frequent nominalization patterns of present-day German for abstract nouns. The theoretical comparison shows that both developments (child language development and the historical development) display an increase in morphological complexity: while both kinds of nominalizations start with simple verbs, prefix and particle verbs follow. In a next step, the nominalization patterns are widened in favor of complex bases.

This study investigates the influence of different socio-demographic, regional and linguistic variables on autochthonous rural Austrian speakers’ productions of comparatives and superlatives in two experimental settings (aiming at standard versus nonstandard registers of individual speech repertoires). Effects of setting, of the distance from the city of Vienna as well as of various linguistic variables were found. Age group turned out to be the most important socio-demographic variable.

This paper focuses on phonetic variation within the standard German language register of Austria. While the norm status and a high socio-symbolic value are attributed to certain lexical variants of standard language in Austria, the norm and usage status of characteristic phonetic properties remain unclear, due to lack of empirical analyses. By investigating the relation between standard language norms and “standard usage” (Gebrauchsstandard) in Austria, our study aims to close this research gap by using the example of unstressed ‹-ig›. The analyses are based on data gathered from 52 speakers from two generations, covering all Austrian dialect regions. Elicitation settings varied from strongly standardized tasks with a graphic or visual stimulus (reading aloud tasks, picture naming tasks) to translation tasks (translation from dialect into standard) with oral stimuli. The results demonstrate that although ‹-ig› is predominantly pronounced like [ɪk], (socio-)linguistic factors as phonetic context, part of speech, setting, gender and regional background influence the ‹-ig›-variation. In total, the data suggest that German speaking Austrians are situated in a conflict between transnationally diverging norms and intra-nationally varying model speakers of German.

Morphonotactics determines phonological conditions on sound sequences produced by morphological operations both with morphemes and across boundaries. This paper examines the historical emergence and the development of morphonotactic consonant clusters in Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Romance and other languages. It examines the role of the following morphological preference parameters: (i) morphotactic transparency/opacity, (ii) morphosemantic transparency/opacity, (iii) morphological richness. We identify several diachronic processes involved in cluster emergence, production and change: vowel loss, Indo-European ablaut (and comparable Arabic processes), affixation, compounding, metathesis, final and consonant epenthesis. Additionally, we discuss predictions derived from the Net Auditory Distance principle, psycholinguistic evidence and language acquisition. We show that the majority of morphonotactic clusters arise, phonologically, from vowel loss, and morphologically from concatenation.

In this first cross-linguistic study of the emergence and early development of synthetic compounds we present the strictly parallel analysis of systematically collected longitudinal data from seven languages: the Finno-Ugric languages Finnish, Saami, Estonian and the Indo-European languages Lithuanian, Russian, Greek and German. The data of spontaneous interactions between children and parents allow insights usually not obtainable via transversal formal tests. For example, the target of acquisition is the specific parental child-directed speech and not the target languages as represented in grammars, dictionaries and adult electronic corpora. The distribution, dates and orders of emergence of various formal and semantic subtypes of synthetic compounds, i.e. instrument, agent, result, action, local deverbal synthetic compounds, differs among the languages studied. These differences are better explained by the relative richness of patterns of synthetic compounds than by other typological criteria such as belonging to, or approaching, the agglutinating vs. the inflecting-fusional language type. The analyses offer support for a building-block model of the rise of morphological complexity, for synthetic compounds being taken up by children as compounds and not as derivations, but being more complex than other types of compounds. Thus, synthetic compounds become productive later than nominal compounds in general.

Die Sprache, die Eltern an ihre Kinder richten, zeigt abhängig vom soziökonomischen Status (SES) der Familie meist große Unterschiede. Während Eltern mit hohem sozioökonomischem Status häufig einen konversationsanregenden und ermutigenden Erziehungsstil praktizieren, pflegen Eltern mit niedrigem sozioökonomischem Status tendenziell einen verhaltenssteuernden, oft entmutigenden Erziehungsstil. Anhand eines Spontansprachkorpus von 29 Wiener Kindern (15 HSES, 14 LSES, Altersspanne 2;11 – 4;11) und ihren elterlichen Hauptbezugspersonen zeigen wir, dass direktive und expressive Sprechakte besonders große SES-Unterschiede aufweisen.

The judicious use of electronic corpora allows new possibilities in the study of word formation. In contrast to the usual way of contrasting morphosemantic transparency (or compositionality) and morphosemantic opacity (or non-compositionality) in a dichotomous way, we present a ten-step scale from maximum transparency to total opacity, exemplified with the common German diminutive suffixation in -chen and Austro-Bavarian -erl. Our corpus-linguistic investigation allows new insights into problems of distribution of type and token frequency according to degrees of morphosemantic transparency/ opacity and of the two rivalling diminutive formations. An analysis of diminutive acquisition is added as external evidence for or against previous claims. Acquisition data come from three longitudinal corpora and from 24 children of a transversal quasi-longitudinal study. Here the order of acquisition of diminutives according to the ten-step scale of morphosemantic transparency/opacity and to adult type and token frequency will be presented and the relation between morphosemantic and morphopragmatic meaning will be discussed.

This contribution deals with competition (rivalry) between diminutive suffixations in (Austrian) German and Italian adult language and child speech and the motivation of differences in terms of productivity and degree of morphosemantic transparency/opacity of the respective diminutives. For this purpose productivity, availability and profitability are differentiated, a scale of morphosemantic transparency/opacity is established which ranges from full transparency (degree 1), over slight pragmatic restrictions (degree 2), to total opacity (unless in metalinguistic reflections: degree 9) and fake decompositionality (degree 10). The degrees of transparency/opacity differ for different suffixations, in German also between compound and simplex diminutives. Longitudinal studies of early child language show that child language is more transparent than adult language in types and tokens. In both there is competition between fully transparent suffixations (degree 1) without any pattern blocking or lexical blocking, because such diminutives are mainly formed and used for pragmatic reasons and never for the purpose of lexical enrichment. Since productivity, availability and profitability of diminutive formation is much higher in Italian than in German, there is much more competition between diminutive suffixations in Italian than in German adult language. This difference between the two languages is much less the case in early child language. Possible psycholinguistic consequences are mentioned in the outlook.

International audience; The distribution of the two most productive diminutive formations in Austrian Standard German (i.e. with the suffixes-chen,-erl) and their degrees of morphosemantic transparency / opacity was studied in different electronic corpora of written and oral speech which represent different genres. The distribution of morphosemantically more transparent and more opaque degrees of diminutive formation differs in these corpora.

Due to high variation and competition of different potential forms, German noun plural formation is known to be challenging for children acquiring German as their first or second language. In order to disentangle linguistic, social and methodological factors, we investigate the acquisition of German noun plurals in 56 kindergarten children living in Vienna (Austria) at four data points from mean ages 3;1 to 4;8. The groups of children were balanced for socio-economic status, language background and gender. We use two different methodologies: (1) a picture-based plural elicitation test in which the plural is formed on the basis of a singular given by the experimenter, (2) spontaneous production data in kindergarten settings. Results demonstrate effects of linguistic background, socio-economic status and methodology: Monolingual high SES children score highest in both settings, but the SES and language gap is greater in the test than in spontaneous speech. If dialect forms are treated as correct plurals, the effects of SES and language background are slightly attenuated. We argue for the use of mixed-methods designs in research projects in order to get a comprehensive picture of children’s linguistic proficiencies, especially when investigating vulnerable populations. En raison de fortes variations et concurrence entre des formes différentes potentielles, la formation du pluriel allemand est connue pour être difficile pour des enfants acquérant l’allemand comme première ou deuxième langue. Pour démêler le rôle des facteurs linguistiques, sociaux et méthodologiques, nous avons examiné l’acquisition du pluriel allemand chez 56 enfants âgés de 3;1 à 4;8 en moyenne habitant à Vienne (Autriche). Les groupes d’enfants ont été équilibrés en contrôlant le statut socio-économique (SES), l’origine linguistique et le sexe. Nous avons utilisé deux méthodologies différentes : (1) un test d’élicitation de pluriels à partir d’images dans lequel l’enfant forme le pluriel d’un singulier donné par l’expérimentateur, (2) la production spontanée à l’école maternelle. Les résultats montrent des effets liés à l’origine linguistique, au SES et à la méthodologie : les enfants monolingues de SES plus élevé obtiennent les meilleurs résultats dans les deux contextes, mais la disparité de SES et d’origine linguistique est plus grande dans le test que dans la production spontanée. Si les formes dialectales sont traitées comme des pluriels corrects, les effets du SES et de l’origine linguistique sont légèrement atténués. Nous plaidons donc pour l’usage de méthodes mixtes afin d’obtenir des analyses aussi complètes que possible sur les compétences linguistiques des enfants, en particulier pour l’examen de populations vulnérables.

Based on the theoretical framework of Dressler and Dziubalska-Kolaczyk (2006a,b), the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis will be tested. It assumes that phonotactics helps in decomposition of words into morphemes: if a certain sequence occurs only or only by default over a morpheme boundary and is thus a prototypical morphonotactic sequence, it should be processed faster and more accurately than a purely phonotactic sequence. Studies on typical and atypical first language acquisition in English, Lithuanian and Polish have shown significant differences between the acquisition of morphonotactic and phonotactic consonant clusters: Morphonotactic clusters are acquired earlier and faster by typically developing children, but are more problematic for children with Specific Language Impairment. However, results on acquisition are less clear for German. The focus of this contribution is whether and how German-speaking adults differentiate between morphonotactic and phonotactic consonant clusters and vowel-consonant sequences in visual word recognition. It investigates whether sub-lexical letter sequences are found faster when the target sequence is separated from the word stem by a morphological boundary than when it is a part of a morphological root. An additional factor that is addressed concerns the position of the target cluster in the word. Due to the bathtub effect, sequences in peripheral positions in a word are more salient and thus facilitate processing more than word-internal positions. Moreover, for adults the primacy effect most favors word-initial position (whereas for young children the recency effect most favors word-final position). Our study discusses effects of phonotactic vs. morphonotactic cluster status and of position within the word.

According to the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis (SMH), speakers use morphonotactic consonant clusters as morphological boundary signals. Morphonotactic clusters are thereby assigned a morphological function in processing, which is assumed to facilitate processing and acquisition of complex consonantal structures. The aim of this paper is that of testing the SMH from a computational point of view, making use of a corpus-based model of neural network activation (PHACTS) trained on a German corpus. We evaluate whether PHACTS produces different representations for homophonous phonological sequences that either contain or do not contain a morphological boundary. The study provides a psycholinguistically plausible simulation of how the cognitive representation of (mor)phonotactic clusters emerges from corpus information about the phonotactics of a given language. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic–Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns for taking a determiner or filler was found in French, but not in Austrian German or Dutch. The authors discuss the possible contributory role of these factors on determiner acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective, also accounting for more specific differences between Austrian German and Dutch.

When speaking to young children, adults adapt their language to that of the child. In this article, we suggest that this child-directed speech (CDS) is the result of a transactional process of dynamic adaptation between the child and the adult. The study compares developmental trajectories of three children to those of the CDS of their caregivers. Furthermore, a mathematical-conceptual model is built that captures the essential dynamics of adaptation in a series of coupled equations. This model is sensitive to changes in the language development of the child. The results show evidence for a dynamic form of adaptation, although there are also clear individual differences.

International audience; In many languages, noun determiner acquisition is a central aspect of the emergence of grammar in children. The study compares the development of determiners -- between one and three years of age -- in the spontaneous productions of two children who acquire French and Austrian German, respectively. Starting with the contrast between Romance and Germanic languages and focusing on morphosyntactic factors, it evaluates the impact of typological and language-specific differences on determiner acquisition. We examine the prediction that determiners should emerge earlier in French than in German and classical hypotheses concerning the pre-eminence of definite over indefinite, masculine over feminine, and singular over plural in the light of developmental data.

International audience; The study investigates the development of determiner use in three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch, from the onset of language until age 3;0. Noun constructions (determiner omission, correct bare nouns, filler and determiner uses) in the children and in their inputs are analysed, providing evidence of similarities in developmental shape as well as differences in frequencies and timing. As expected, determiner use was delayed in the Germanic languages as compared to French. Differences between the Austrian and the Dutch child were explained by language properties and by child characteristics. Modelling dynamic input-output relations provided evidence of styles of long-term parental adaptation (accommodation for the French and complementarity for the Dutch and Austrian children).

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e +U, -er +U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.

This chapter distinguishes among different types of competing motivations and discusses examples of competing motivations in morphology on its own (notably affix order and markedness vs. frequency) or in its interface either with the lexicon or with discourse (in compounding) or with phonology (in morphonotactics). It also discusses competing motivations in the context of investigations of first language acquisition and experiments on the acquisition and processing of actual vs. potential vs. illegal German plurals. It is concluded by discussing the implications of the nature of competing motivation in these different types of research for the notion of competing motivation in general and for the manner in which the resolution of conflict in language research can lead to the advancement of knowledge in linguistics and psycholinguistics.

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age.

International audience

A substantial tradition of linguistic inquiry has framed the knowledge of native speakers in terms of their ability to determine the grammatical acceptability of language forms that they encounter for the first time. In the domain of morphology, the productivity framework of Dressler (CLASNET Working papers 7, 1997) has emphasized the importance of this ability in terms of the graded potentiality of non-existing multimorphemic forms. The goal of this study was to investigate what role the notion of potentiality plays in online lexical well-formedness judgment among children who are native speakers of Austrian German. A total of 114 children between the ages of six and ten and a total of 40 adults between the ages of 18 and 30 (as a comparison group) participated in an online well-formedness judgment task which focused on pluralized German nouns. Concrete, picturable, high frequency German nouns were presented in three pluralized forms: (a) actual existing plural form, (b) morphologically illegal plural form, (c) potential (but not existing) plural form. Participants were shown pictures of the nouns (as a set of three identical items) and simultaneously heard one of three pluralized forms for each noun. Response latency and judgment type served as dependent variables. Results indicate that both children and adults are sensitive to the distinction between illegal and potential forms (neither of which they would have encountered). For all participants, plural frequency (rather than frequency of the singular form) affected responses for both existing and non-existing words. Other factors increasing acceptability were the presence of supplementary umlaut in addition to suffixation and homophony with existing words or word forms.

This study proposes a new methodology for determining the relationship between child-directed speech and child speech in early acquisition. It illustrates the use of this methodology in investigating the relationship between the morphological richness of child-directed speech and the speed of morphological development in child speech. Both variables are defined in terms of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and estimated in a set of longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of nine children and their caretakers. The children are aged 1;3–3;0, acquiring nine different languages that vary in terms of morphological richness. The main result is that the degree of morphological richness in child-directed speech is positively related to the speed of development of noun and verb paradigms in child speech.

This paper is a contrastive analysis of French and German adult reactions such as repetitions and other reformulations to morphologically incomplete or erroneous child productions on the one hand and to morphologically complete and conventional utterances on the other hand. According to our results, adults of both languages seem to react differently to problems of synthetic morphology and of periphrastic morphology, the former being preferentially corrected whereas the latter tend to be accepted by the adults.