Exploring case marking in German first language acquisition using the acquisition sketch approach

This paper provides an example of a sketch description as suggested in the Sketch Acquisition Manual (SAM) in this issue. The SAM provides guidelines for sketch descriptions of child language and child-directed language in under-studied languages. Since this sketch approach has not been tested for well-researched languages yet, the aim of this paper was to evaluate this novel method. Therefore, five hours of natural conversation data from two children acquiring German as their first language were processed according to the guidelines proposed in the manual. The analysis focused on the acquisition of German case-marked definite articles as there is a large body of research in this area. Hypotheses about German first language acquisition based on the identified patterns were then compared to existing literature on the acquisition of German grounded in a large amount of data. All findings were consistent with the existing (case) acquisition literature. However, there were also phenomena which are described in the literature but were not attested by the sketch analysis. The results suggest that the sketch format cannot be expected to reveal all language acquisition phenomena of a certain language but may have the potential to uncover the most evident acquisition processes.