Two-year-olds' productivity with verbal inflections.
Previous research has examined children's ability to add inflections to nonsense words. The current experiments were designed to determine whether children, ranging in age from 1;9 to 2;10 (N = 34), could demonstrate productivity by dropping verbal inflections. In Experiment 1, children added -ed and -ing to novel stems, and dropped them from novel inflected forms and did so largely appropriately. In Experiment 2, they dropped -ing from verbs, but not from nouns, suggesting that when young children drop inflections they tend to do so appropriately, and not simply for ease of pronunciation.
Hohenstein
Jill
J
Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH, United Kingdom. jill.hohenstein@kcl.ac.uk
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D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary