TY  - JOUR
A1  - van de Vijver, Ruben
A1  - Baer-Henney, Dinah
T1  - On the role of phonetic motivation and frequency in the acquisition of alternations
T2  - Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik
N2  - On the Role of Phonetic Motivation and Frequency in the Acquisition of Alternations
 German nouns may alternate in two ways: a final word-final voiceless obstruent in the singular may correspond to a voiced one in the plural and a back vowel in the singular may correspond to a front one in the plural. We investigate the role of phonetic motivation and frequency in the acquisition of these alternations. The voicing alternation has a phonetic motivation, but the vowel alternation does not. On the basis of two corpus studies, we conclude that both alternations occur with equal frequency in the ambient language. In two production experiments, one with 5-year-olds and one with adults, we asked both populations to form plurals for given singular words and nonces. The children produce more voicing alternations in nonces than adults and fewer vowel alternations than adults. We conclude that children rely more on phonetic motivation than adults.
Y1  - 2013
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/35181
SN  - 0049-8653
VL  - 43
IS  - 169
SP  - 49
EP  - 64
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Stuttgart
ER  -