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Two-year-olds' productivity with verbal inflections*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2007

JILL HOHENSTEIN  and
NAMEERA AKHTAR
JILL HOHENSTEIN*
Affiliation:
King's College London
NAMEERA AKHTAR
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
*
Address for correspondence: Jill Hohenstein, Department of Education and Professional Studies, King's College London, Waterloo Road, London, SE1 9NH, United Kingdom. e-mail: jill.hohenstein@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

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.

Type
Note
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , November 2007 , pp. 861 - 873
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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