The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who…

In this study, verb placement with respect to negation is investigated in elicited production and elicited sentence imitation data collected with child second language (L2) learners of German. These data are compared to published data from adult L2 learners, which were collected with the same elicitation materials and were re-analysed for the…

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix "ge-"). Findings reported in the literature are…

Existing studies on plural acquisition in German have relied on small samples and thus hardly deliver generalizable and differentiated results. Here, overgeneralizations of certain plural allomorphs and other tendencies in the acquisition of German plural markers are described on the basis of test data from 7,394 3- to 5-year-old monolingual…