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ERIC Number: EJ861068
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Nov
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Knowing More than One Can Say: The Early Regular Plural
Zapf, Jennifer A.; Smith, Linda B.
Journal of Child Language, v36 n5 p1145-1155 Nov 2009
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[right arrow]AA) or the initial picture next to a very different thing (A[right arrow]AB). The children in A[right arrow]AA rarely produced the plural. The children in A[right arrow]AB supplied the singular form of A but children in A[right arrow]AA did not. Experiment 3 compared the performance of English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children in A[right arrow]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.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A