Some differences between English plural noun inflections and third singular verb inflections in the input: the contributions of frequency, sentence position, and duration

Abstract

Grammatical inflections such as the English plural noun -s and third person singular verb -s are acquired at different points in time by young children. This finding is typically attributed to factors such as relative semantic salience or the distinction between lexical and functional categories. In this study input frequency, sentence position, and duration were examined as possible contributing factors. In both conversations with and stories aimed at young children, noun plural inflections were found to be more frequent than third singular verb inflections, especially in sentence-final position. Analysis of the speech of four mothers reading stories to their two-year-old children confirmed that duration differences also exist in the input. Because fricatives were lengthened in sentence-final position and plural nouns were much more likely to appear in these positions than were third singular verb forms, plural nouns were significantly longer than third singular inflections on average. The possible implications of these findings for language learnability theories and accounts of grammatical deficits in specific language impairment are discussed.

Phonological Constraints on Children’s Production of English Third Person Singular – s

“…In addition to coda complexity, we examined whether the position of the third person singular morpheme within the utterance influenced children's production of third person singular -s. In subject-verb-object languages such as English, children hear third person singular verbs more often in utterance-medial position than in utterance-final position (Hsieh et al, 1999). Similarly, we found that 72% of the children's attempted third person singular verbs in this study occurred in utterance-medial position.…”

“…Leonard and colleagues (e.g., Leonard & Bortolini, 1998) have raised the possibility that inflectional morphemes might be especially vulnerable and are likely to be omitted because they are composed of phonetically short elements that might be difficult to perceive. This problem is exacerbated in the case of English verbs, as these tend to occur utterance-medially in parental speech, whereas plural nouns tend to occur utterance-finally (Hsieh, Leonard, & Swanson, 1999). Hsieh et al (1999) report that, as a consequence of this difference in distribution, third person singular -s is much shorter in duration compared with plural -s, perhaps reducing the perceptional salience of the third person singular morpheme.…”

“…This problem is exacerbated in the case of English verbs, as these tend to occur utterance-medially in parental speech, whereas plural nouns tend to occur utterance-finally (Hsieh, Leonard, & Swanson, 1999). Hsieh et al (1999) report that, as a consequence of this difference in distribution, third person singular -s is much shorter in duration compared with plural -s, perhaps reducing the perceptional salience of the third person singular morpheme. These authors suggest that this distributional difference may help explain some of the differences in the rate of acquisition of plural -s versus third person singular -s.…”

“…Given the high frequency of utterance-medial third person singular verbs in parental speech (Hsieh et al, 1999), we might have expected children to accurately produce third person singular -s in utterance-medial position. As shown in Table 4, morpheme production was significantly influenced by position: However, the coefficient indicates that children produced fewer correct third person singular morphemes in utterance-medial position.…”

Acquisition of the Malagasy voicing system: implications for the adult grammar

“…Rumelhart and McClelland 1986), take statistical properties of the input to be the primary determinant of development, and some acquisition studies have shown that the relative frequency of particular pieces of morphology (e.g. Hseieh et al (1999)) and of particular lexical items such as verbs (Naigles and Hoff-Ginsberg 1998) correlate with their order of acquisition in the child's language. It has also been proposed that the acquisition of particular syntactic constructions, for example wh questions, is affected by the relative frequency of specific wh + verb combinations in the input (Rowland et al 2003).…”