Genus und Sexus im Konflikt.

The specialty of hybrid nouns is their different agreement according to certain features of the agreement target. They result from a conflict within in the gender assignment system. For example, the German noun Mädchen (semi-transparent diminutive for denoting a girl) is grammatical neuter but it refers to a female person. In German, nouns denoting females are feminine but diminutives are neuter. Since both rules apply, you can refer to Mädchen with a neuter (es) but also with a feminine pronoun (sie). There are different factors which influence the agreement pattern: the linear distance between noun and pronoun and the type of agreement target. So far there are only few studies on the influence of possible non-grammatical factors such as the age of the referent. In this paper, I elaborate on those factors and present the results of a discourse completion task focusing on the influence of a sexualized context.

Testing the Agreement/Tense Omission Model using an elicited imitation paradigm

The present study used an elicited imitation paradigm to test the prediction of Schutze & Wexler's (1996) AGREEMENT/TENSE OMISSION MODEL (ATOM) that the rate of non-nominative subjects with agreement-marked verb forms will be sufficiently low that such errors can reasonably be disregarded as noise in the data. A screening procedure identified five children who produced non-nominative subject errors (all her for she) who were then asked to repeat 24 sentences with 3sg feminine pronoun subjects (she) and agreeing main verbs or auxiliaries. All five children produced at least one non-nominative subject (her) with an agreement-marked verb form, and for none of these five children was the non-NOM+AGR rate significantly different to the rate that would be expected by chance, given the independent frequencies of non-nominative subjects and agreement-marked verb forms in their data. The three children for whom this expected (by chance) error rate was significantly greater than 10% (representing an acceptable level of noise in the data) produced non-NOM+AGR errors at a rate significantly greater than 10%, counter to the prediction of the ATOM. These results replicate and extend the naturalistic-data findings of Pine et al. using a different method. They also provide support for the use of elicited imitation as a methodology for assessing children's early grammatical knowledge.

Patterns of pronoun case error

This paper addresses the question of whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error are influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children, aged 2;6 to 4;0 were audiotaped for two 1-hour sessions, interacting with their primary caregivers engaged in free play, book reading and family album viewing. It was found that her was overextended for she at a significantly higher rate than him for he and them for they, providing evidence of a ‘double-cell’ effect that increases the incidence of error in the feminine pronoun. It was also found that the overextension of nominative forms (e.g. he for him), were antagonistic to the more frequently occurring type of overextension, objective for nominative (e.g. him for he). These findings indicate that the composition of a pronoun's paradigm influenced the patterns of pronoun case error observed.