Competition in the acquisition of Danish noun plural markers

The aim of this study was to explore the acquisition of the Danish noun plural system. A plural elicitation task was administered to 160 monolingual Danish-speaking children aged 3-10 years. Based on earlier studies in other languages we would expect an impact of productivity of the plural marker on the direction of overgeneralizations: Unproductive → Semi-Productive → Fully Productive. However, other factors seem to sometimes overrule this impact: The Semi-Productive plural marker ‘Ø’ (PL = SG) appears to be the most important attractor of overgeneralizations in Danish. The results are discussed in relation to studies in the acquisition of other languages as well as models of acquisition of inflectional morphology.