Abstract

The Nominal Mapping Parameter gave rise to an acquisition model which makes clear and falsifiable statements about the acquisition of articles in German. It claims that children acquiring a Germanic language omit articles for a longer period of time than children acquiring a Romance language, as they have to decide for each noun separately whether it is count or mass. Thus, article drop in the acquisition of Germanic languages is considered to be a lexical learning problem. This study presents a critical discussion of this model on the basis of data from ten children acquiring German. Although these children pass through a protracted period of article omissions, omissions are unrelated to the count/mass distinction.