The input ambiguity hypothesis and case blindness: an account of cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic differences in case errors.
English-acquiring children frequently make pronoun case errors, while German-acquiring children rarely do. Nonetheless, German-acquiring children frequently make article case errors. It is proposed that when child-directed speech contains a high percentage of case-ambiguous forms, case errors are common in child language; when percentages are low, case errors are rare. Input to English and German children was analyzed for percentage of case-ambiguous personal pronouns on adult tiers of corpora from 24 English-acquiring and 24 German-acquiring children. Also analyzed for German was the percentage of case-ambiguous articles. Case-ambiguous pronouns averaged 63·3% in English, compared with 7·6% in German. The percentage of case-ambiguous articles in German was 77·0%. These percentages align with the children's errors reported in the literature. It appears children may be sensitive to levels of ambiguity such that low ambiguity may aid error-free acquisition, while high ambiguity may blind children to case distinctions, resulting in errors.
Pelham
Sabra D
SD
University of Florida, FL, USA. spelham@ufl.edu
D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004739:England; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D019303:Multilingualism