Acoustic investigations into the later acquisition of syllabic -es plurals

Children acquire /-z/ syllabic plurals (e.g., bus es) later than /-s, -z/ segmental plurals (e.g., cat s, dog s). In this study, the authors explored whether increased syllable number or segmental factors best explains poorer performance with syllabic plurals.

An elicited imitation experiment was conducted with 14 two-year-olds involving 8 familiar disyllabic target plural nouns, half with syllabic plurals (e.g., bus → bus es) and half with segmental plurals (e.g., letter → letter s). Children saw pictures of the target items on a computer and repeated prerecorded 3-word-utterances with the target word in utterance-medial position (e.g., "The buses come") and utterance-final position (e.g., "Hear the buses"). Acoustic analysis determined the presence or absence of the plural morpheme and its duration.

Children had more trouble producing syllabic plurals compared with segmental plurals. Errors were especially evident in the utterance-medial position, where there was less time for the child to perceive/produce the word in the absence of phrase-final lengthening and where planning for the following word was still required.

The results suggested that articulatory difficulties-rather than a word length effect-explain later acquisition of syllabic plurals relative to segmental plurals. These findings have implications for the nature of syllabic plural acquisition in children with hearing impairments and specific language impairment.