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.
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