Testing the effects of frequency on the rate of learning : Determiner use in early French, German and Italian
This paper examines whether the token frequency of bare nouns in child-directed input is related to the amount of determiner omission in child lan-guage by comparing input and child data in the languages French, Germanand Italian. It is shown that these languages differ in the extent to whichthey allow and require bare nouns. Although French exhibits the lowestnumber of bare nouns, French-learning