Cues to form and function in the acquisition of German number and case inflection

German children seem to acquire plural marking with apparent ease, although plural is encoded by several allomorphs with different degrees of predictability. Data from a dense database of a boy between age 2;0 and 2;5 show that all plural allomorphs are abstracted early and are used for overgeneralization. This study looks specifically at the highly frequent overgeneralization of the affix -n. Errors with -n result in the most prototypical plural schema: a bisyllabic noun ending in -n. The hypothesis that the child cuts back on -s errors when he acquires the homophonous case marker for dative plurals could not be confirmed, as the dative plural does not seem to be acquired in this period. Keywords: German; allomorphy; Noun Phrase