Startseite Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
Artikel
Lizenziert
Nicht lizenziert Erfordert eine Authentifizierung

Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English

  • Chiara Repetti-Ludlow ORCID logo EMAIL logo und Laurel MacKenzie ORCID logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 26. April 2022
Linguistics Vanguard
Aus der Zeitschrift Linguistics Vanguard Band 8 Heft 1

Abstract

From a young age, children go through a stage of leveling irregular forms. They are also known to probability-match variable phenomena. However, it is still unclear how children treat phenomena that are both irregular and variable. Does their tendency to overregularize take over, leading them to seize on the regular occurrences and produce them at an even higher rate than adults, or do children probability-match in these cases? In order to study this question, we turn to the variably voiced plurals of English nouns that end in a voiceless fricative, like leaves, houses, and paths. We find that children seem to probability-match for /s/-final and /θ/-final stems (e.g. houses, paths), but not for /f/-final stems (e.g. leaves). This finding has implications for our understanding of first language acquisition, and how learners acquire words with multiple processing requirements.

Keywords: first language acquisition; language change; morphology; phonology; sociolinguistic variation
Corresponding author: Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, Department of Linguistics, New York University, 10 Washington Place, 10003 New York, NY, USA, E-mail:

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Ailís Cournane for helpful feedback.

Appendix A

Table 1:

The corpora used for stem-final fricative data. The number of children refers to the total number of children included in the corpus, not the number who produced the relevant tokens. Also note that while the plural targets column represents all useable plural tokens in each corpus, the singular targets column represents only a sample of relevant singular tokens in each corpus.

Corpus Age range of children Number of children Singular targets Plural targets
Bloom 1;9–3;2 3 8 4
Braunwald 1;0–6;0 1 22 11
Davis 0;7–2;4 21 17 14
EllisWeismer 2;6–5;6 138 58 29
Gleason 2;1–5;2 48 6 3
Goad 1;5–3;6 2 6 3
Hall 4;6–5;0 39 24 12
HSLLD 2;0–6;0 83 16 8
MacWhinney 0;7–8;0 2 72 36
Peters/Wilson 1;7–4;1 1 25 34
POLER 5;0–12;0 26 0 1
Providence 1;0–3;0 6 112 56
Sachs 1;1–5;1 1 10 5
Snow 2;3–3;9 1 12 6
Weist 2;1–5;0 6 55 35

Appendix B

Figure 6: Generalized linear mixed-effects model output. Phoneme is treatment-coded, with /f/ as the reference level.
Figure 6:

Generalized linear mixed-effects model output. Phoneme is treatment-coded, with /f/ as the reference level.

References

Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67. 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.Suche in Google Scholar

Becker, Michael, Andrew Nevins & Jonathan Levine. 2012. Asymmetries in generalizing alternations to and from initial syllables. Language 88. 231–268. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2012.0049.Suche in Google Scholar

Bellinger, David C. & Jean Berko Gleason. 1982. Sex differences in parental directives to young children. Journal of Sex Roles 8. 1123–1139. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00290968.Suche in Google Scholar

Berko, Jean. 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14. 150–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659661.Suche in Google Scholar

Bloom, Lois, Lois Hood & Patsy Lightbown. 1974. Imitation in language development: If, when and why. Cognitive Psychology 6. 380–420. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(74)90018-8.Suche in Google Scholar

Boersma, Paul & David Weenink. 2015. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer, version [6.0.29] [computer program]. Available at: http://www.praat.org/.Suche in Google Scholar

Braunwald, Susan R. 1971. Mother-child communication: The function of maternal-language input. Cognitive Psychology 27(1–3). 28–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1971.11435613.Suche in Google Scholar

Bybee, Joan L. & Dan I. Slobin. 1982. Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense. Language 58. 265–289. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.1982.0021.Suche in Google Scholar

Cournane, Ailís. 2019. A developmental view on incrementation in language change. Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 45(3–4). 127–150. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0010.Suche in Google Scholar

Davis, Barbara L. & Peter F. MacNeilage. 1996. The articulatory basis of babbling. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 38. 1199–1211. https://doi.org/10.1044/jshr.3806.1199.Suche in Google Scholar

Demuth, Katherine, Jennifer Culbertson & Jennifer Alter. 2006. Word-minimality, epenthesis, and coda licensing in the acquisition of English. Journal of Fluency Disorders 49. 137–174. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309060490020201.Suche in Google Scholar

Dickinson, David K. & Patton O. Tabors (eds.). 2001. Beginning literacy with language: Young children learning at home and school. Baltimore: Paul Brookes Publishing.Suche in Google Scholar

Graves, Michael F. & Stephen Koziol. 1971. Noun plural development in primary grade children. Child Development 42(4). 1165–1173. https://doi.org/10.2307/1127801.Suche in Google Scholar

Hall, Erin & Ruth Maddeaux. 2020. /u/-fronting and /æ/-raising in Toronto families. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 47. 51–60.Suche in Google Scholar

Hall, William S., William E. Nagy & Robert Linn Hillsdale. 1984. Spoken words: Effects of situation and social group on oral word usage and frequency. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Suche in Google Scholar

Hendricks, Alison Eisel, Karen Miller & Carrie N. Jackson. 2018. Regularizing unpredictable variation: Evidence from a natural language setting. Language Learning and Development 14(1). 42–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2017.1340842.Suche in Google Scholar

van Heuven, Walter J. B., Pawel Mandera, Emmanuel Keuleers & Marc Brysbaert. 2014. SUBTLEX-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 67(6). 1176–1190. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.850521.Suche in Google Scholar

Hooper, Joan B. 1976. Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of morphophonological change. In William M. Christie Jr (ed.), Current progress in historical linguistics: Proceedings of the second international conference on historical linguistics, Tucson, Arizona, 12–16 January 1976, 96–105. Amsterdam: North Holland.Suche in Google Scholar

Hudson Kam, Carla L. 2015. The impact of conditioning variables on the acquisition of variation in adult and child learners. Language 9. 906–937. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2015.0051.Suche in Google Scholar

Hudson Kam, Carla L. & Elissa L. Newport. 2005. Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development 1(2). 151–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2005.9684215.Suche in Google Scholar

Hudson Kam, Carla L. & Elissa L. Newport. 2009. Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages. Cognitive Psychology 59(1). 30–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2009.01.001.Suche in Google Scholar

Jespersen, Otto. 1942. A modern English grammar on historical principles, part VI: Morphology. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaardg.Suche in Google Scholar

Kerswill, Paul. 1996. Children, adolescents, and language change. Language Variation and Change 8(2). 177–202. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500001137.Suche in Google Scholar

Kerswill, Paul & Ann Williams. 2000. Creating a new town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29(1). 65–115. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500001020.Suche in Google Scholar

Labov, William. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1(1). 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000120.Suche in Google Scholar

Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Suche in Google Scholar

Lass, Roger. 2000. Phonology and morphology. In Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language, vol. 3: 1476–1776, chap. 3, 56–186. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CHOL9780521264761.004Suche in Google Scholar

MacKenzie, Laurel. 2018. Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ∼ θ]s of change. Language Variation and Change 30(2). 147–174. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394518000091.Suche in Google Scholar

MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Suche in Google Scholar

MacWhinney, Brian & Catherine Snow. 1990. The child language data exchange system: An update. Journal of Child Language 17. 457–472. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900013866.Suche in Google Scholar

Maratsos, Michael. 2000. More overregularizations after all: New data and discussion on Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander, Rosen & Xu. Journal of Child Language 27(1). 183–212. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000999004067.Suche in Google Scholar

Marchman, Virginia A., Kim Plunkett & Judith Goodman. 1997. Overregularization in English plural and past tense inflectional morphology: A response to Marcus (1995). Journal of Child Language 24(3). 767–779. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000997003206.Suche in Google Scholar

Marcus, Gary F. 1995. Children’s overregularization of English plurals: A quantitative analysis. Journal of Child Language 22(2). 447–459. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900009879.Suche in Google Scholar

Marcus, Gary F., Steven Pinker, Michael Ullman, Michelle Hollander, T. John Rosen, Fei Xu & Harald Clahsen. 1992. Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 57. i–178. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166115.Suche in Google Scholar

Maslen, Robert J. C., Anna L. Theakston, Elena V. M. Lieven & Michael Tomasello. 2004. A dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregularization in English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 47(6). 1319–1333. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2004/099).Suche in Google Scholar

Miller, Karen. 2013. Acquisition of variable rules: /s/-lenition in the speech of Chilean Spanish-speaking children and their caregivers. Language Variation and Change 25. 311–340. https://doi.org/10.1017/s095439451300015x.Suche in Google Scholar

Parsons, Jennifer. 2006. Positional effects in phonological development: A case study. St John’s. Memorial University of Newfoundland MA thesis.Suche in Google Scholar

R Core Team. 2017. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Suche in Google Scholar

Ringe, Donald & Joseph F. Eska. 2013. Historical linguistics: Toward a twenty-first century reintegration. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511980183Suche in Google Scholar

Roberts, Julia Lee. 1994. Acquisition of variable rules: (-t,d) deletion and (ing) production in preschool children. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Dissertation.Suche in Google Scholar

Roberts, Julie. 1997. Acquisition of variable rules: A study of (-t, d) deletion in preschool children. Language Learning and Development 24(2). 351–372. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000997003073.Suche in Google Scholar

Roberts, Julie & William Labov. 1995. Learning to talk Philadelphian: Acquisition of short a by preschool children. Language Variation and Change 7(1). 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394500000910.Suche in Google Scholar

Ross, Danielle S. & Elissa L. Newport. 1996. The development of language from non-native linguistic input. Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) 20. 623–645.Suche in Google Scholar

Sachs, Jacqueline & Keith E. Nelson. 1983. Talking about the there and then: The emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. Children’s Language 4. 1–28.Suche in Google Scholar

Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Hazel Richards. 2013. The social and linguistic in the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms: Caregivers, children, and variation. Linguistics 51(2). 285–324. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0012.Suche in Google Scholar

Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Liane Fortune. 2007. “Mam, my trousers is fa’in doon!”: Community, caregiver, and child in the acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change 19(1). 63–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394507070044.Suche in Google Scholar

Steinberg, Mara E., Nan Bernstein Ratner, William Gaillard & Madison Berl. 2013. Fluency patterns in narratives from children with localization-related epilepsy. Journal of Fluency Disorders 38(2). 193–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfludis.2013.01.003.Suche in Google Scholar

Weismer, Susan Ellis, Courtney E. Venker, Julia L. Evans & Maura Jones Moyle. 2013. Fast mapping in late-talking toddlers. Applied Psycholinguistics 34(1). 69–89. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0142716411000610.Suche in Google Scholar

Weist, Richard M. & Andrea A. Zevenbergen. 2008. Autobiographical memory and past time reference. Language Learning and Development 4(4). 291–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475440802293490.Suche in Google Scholar

Wilson, Bob & Ann M. Peters. 1988. What are you cookin’ on a hot? Movement constraints in the speech of a three-year-old blind child. Language 64. 249–273. https://doi.org/10.2307/415434.Suche in Google Scholar

Yang, Charles. 2002. Knowledge and learning in natural language. New York: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Received: 2021-04-28
Accepted: 2021-09-23
Published Online: 2022-04-26

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2022
  4. Research Articles
  5. Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
  6. How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
  7. Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
  8. Phonetic change over the career: a case study
  9. Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
  10. The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
  11. Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
  12. Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
  13. Modeling (im)precision in context
  14. The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
  15. Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
  16. Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
  17. A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
  18. Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
  19. Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
  20. A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
  21. Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
  22. L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
  23. Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
  24. Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
  25. The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
  26. Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
  27. Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
  28. Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
  29. How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
  30. The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
  31. A cognitive semantic analysis of ‘eat’ verb usages in Bangla
  32. Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction
  33. Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations
  34. Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists
  35. Corrigendum
  36. Corrigendum to: repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0064
Schlagwörter für diesen Artikel
first language acquisition; language change; morphology; phonology; sociolinguistic variation

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Editorial 2022
  4. Research Articles
  5. Perceptual similarity is not all: online perception of English coda stops by Korean listeners
  6. How Russian speakers express evolution in Pokémon names: an experimental study with nonce words
  7. Individual differences in simultaneous perceptual compensation for coarticulatory and lexical cues
  8. Phonetic change over the career: a case study
  9. Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
  10. The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
  11. Length, position, and functions of inter-clausal Chinese–English code-switching in a bilingual novel
  12. Discourse connectives and their arguments: an experiment on anaphoricity in German
  13. Modeling (im)precision in context
  14. The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German
  15. Introducing Construction Semantics (CxS): a frame-semantic extension of Construction Grammar and constructicography
  16. Defining numeral classifiers and identifying classifier languages of the world
  17. A multivariate analysis of causative do and causative make in Middle English
  18. Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?
  19. Metaphors are embodied otherwise they would not be metaphors
  20. A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon
  21. Accounting for the relationship between lexical prevalence and acquisition with Bayesian networks and population dynamics
  22. L2 motivation and willingness to communicate: a moderated mediation model of psychological shyness
  23. Why are multiword units hard to acquire for late L2 learners? Insights from cognitive science on adult learning, processing, and retrieval
  24. Regularization in the face of variable input: Children’s acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English
  25. The Manchester Voices Accent Van: taking sociolinguistic data collection on the road
  26. Interpreting the order of operations in a sociophonetic analysis
  27. Individual variation in performing reading-aloud speech among deaf speakers
  28. Generating hypotheses for alternations at low and intermediate levels of schematicity. The use of Memory-based Learning
  29. How can complex graphemes be identified in German?
  30. The Menzerath-Altmann law on the clause level in English texts
  31. A cognitive semantic analysis of ‘eat’ verb usages in Bangla
  32. Metonymy in the Korean internally headed relative clause construction
  33. Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations
  34. Monomodal and multimodal metaphors in editorial cartoons on the coronavirus by Jordanian cartoonists
  35. Corrigendum
  36. Corrigendum to: repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions
Jetzt anmelden und 20% sparen
Institutioneller Zugang
Wie funktioniert Authentifizierung?
Haben Sie eine Idee, wie wir unsere Website verbessern können?
Bitte schreiben Sie uns.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Heruntergeladen am 21.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0064/html
Button zum nach oben scrollen