Schemas and competing paradigms in Swedish plural formation

According to autonomous descriptions of Swedish morphology, for the majority of nouns the gender of the lexeme and the phonological nature of the last segment or segments of the base form (indefinite singular) determine the inflectional category of the noun. The purpose of the present study is to find out if Swedish may resort to the use of larger shapes than the terminal segment or segments in the allegedly ambiguous monosyllabic CVC words. It has been shown in other languages-here giving English as an example-that items in semiproductive classes (like the English ablaut verbs string:strung and spin:spun) are associated via formal phonological links or bundles of links that constrain the manner in which native speakers pattern these form-to-form connections within morphological paradigms (see Bybee & Slobin, 1982; Bybee, 1985). The present wug-type experiment with legal nonwords was administered to three groups of children, i.e., 8- to 9-year-olds, 10- to 11-year-olds, and 15-year-olds. It was hypothesized that the ambiguous monosyllabic CVC lexemes would stabilize themselves slowly and late during language acquisition. The results show a vowel and consonant effect in the en-gender CVC nonwords. Swedish thus resorts to the use of larger shapes (schema analogies) than the terminal segment or segments. Moreover, a development of paradigm membership toward adultlike patterns is seen at late stages of language acquisition of both the ambiguous and the unambiguous nonword types.