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Knowing more than one can say: the early regular plural.
Jennifer A Zapf1, Linda B Smith
1University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Department of Psychology, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Mary Ann Cofrin Hall C310, Green Bay, WI 54311, USA. zapfj@uwgb.edu
Journal of Child Language
|February 24, 2009
Summary
Two-year-old children learning English show early awareness of plural forms. Even before mastering production rules, they demonstrate knowledge that a plural exists, differentiating it from singular nouns.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Child Language Acquisition
Background:
- Understanding how children acquire grammatical morphemes, like the English plural '-s', is crucial for developmental linguistics.
- Early language development involves complex processes of rule generalization and lexical acquisition.
- Cross-linguistic comparisons offer insights into universal and language-specific aspects of language learning.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the extent of two-year-old children's knowledge of the regular English plural.
- To examine whether children differentiate between singular and plural forms during early acquisition.
- To compare English-speaking children's plural acquisition with that of Japanese-speaking children, who learn a language without mandatory plurals.
Main Methods:
- Children were presented with a singular item and its label, followed by either two identical items (A-->AA) or one item and a different item (A-->AB).
- Experiment 3 involved comparing English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children's responses to common and novel nouns in the A-->AA condition.
- Children's production of singular and plural forms was analyzed in response to the experimental manipulations.
Main Results:
- Children in the A-->AA condition rarely produced the plural form.
- Children in the A-->AB condition often supplied the singular form, but not the plural.
- Japanese-speaking children, unlike English-speaking children, frequently supplied the singular form in the A-->AA condition, regardless of noun novelty.
Conclusions:
- Young English-learning children possess partial knowledge of the plural morpheme, understanding its existence before full mastery of production rules.
- Children's performance suggests an early distinction between singular and plural, even with limited production capabilities.
- Cross-linguistic data indicate that the absence of mandatory plurals in a native language influences acquisition strategies.
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