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Knowing more than one can say: The early regular plural*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2009

JENNIFER A. ZAPF  and
LINDA B. SMITH
JENNIFER A. ZAPF*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
LINDA B. SMITH
Affiliation:
Indiana University
*
Address for correspondence: Jennifer A. Zapf, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Department of Psychology, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Mary Ann Cofrin Hall C310, Green Bay, WI 54311. e-mail: zapfj@uwgb.edu
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Abstract

This paper reports on partial knowledge in two-year-old children's learning of the regular English plural. In Experiments 1 and 2, children were presented with one kind and its label and then were either presented with two of that same kind (A→AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A→AB). The children in A→AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A→AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A→AA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in A→AA with common and novel nouns. The Japanese-speaking children (learning a language without a mandatory plural) supplied the singular form of A but the English-speaking children did not. The findings indicate young children learning English know there is a plural to be learned before they have fully worked out the rules of production or acquired the necessary singular–plural pairs for broad generalization.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 5 , November 2009 , pp. 1145 - 1155
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant (R01 MH60200). This first author was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health grant (T32 HD07475). We thank Jennifer Benson, Caitlin Hanrahan and Emiko Nakanaga for assisting in data collection.

References

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