OI errors and modal constructions in Dutch and German

[Julian Pine]

Dear info-childers,

My colleagues and I are currently doing some work in which we model
developmental changes in the level of OI errors in different languages
as a function of children's ability to produce progressively longer
utterances.

The model basically simulates OI errors by learning them from more
complex verb constructions such as modal constructions in Dutch and
German. However, while running simulations of Dutch and German
children, we have found what look like systematic cross-linguistic
differences both in the proportion of OI errors in children's speech
and in the proportion of modal constructions in the input across the
two languages (with German children showing lower rates of OI errors
and German mothers showing lower rates of modal constructions).

What we would like to know is:

a) Whether either or both of these differences are already well
established in the literature, and if so where we can read about them

and

b) Whether there is any obvious explanation of the difference in the
proportion of modal constructions in Dutch and German mothers' speech.

Our intuition is that this second difference reflects the fact that
there are some functions which it is more natural to express using
modal constructions in Dutch and simple finite constructions in German,
but we would be grateful for any pointers that people could give us to
analyses of Dutch and German (and the differences between them) that
would help us to flesh this out.


Regards


Julian Pine
School of Psychology
University of Liverpool
Bedford Street South
Liverpool
L69 7ZA
United Kingdom