School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
Cogn Sci. 2006 Nov 12;30(6):1027-52. doi: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_66.
How do English-speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying "dress" to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11-9;9) participated in 3 inflection studies. In Study 1, we show that errors of omission occur until the age of 7 and are more likely with both sibilant regular nouns (e.g., dress) and irregular nouns (e.g., man) than regular nouns (e.g., dog). Sibilant nouns are more likely to be inflected if they are high frequency. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that similar effects apply to the inflection of verbs and that there is an advantage for "regular-like" irregulars whose inflected form, but not stem form, ends in d/t. The results imply that (a) stems and inflected forms compete for production and (b) children generalize both product-oriented and source-oriented schemas when learning about inflectional morphology.
英语国家的儿童如何对名词进行复数变化、对动词进行过去时变化？我们通过考察儿童产生词干而非其屈折变化形式的遗漏错误（例如，用“dress”指代 5 件连衣裙）来评估对这一问题的理论回答。共有 307 名儿童（年龄 3 岁 11 个月至 9 岁 9 个月）参与了 3 项屈折变化研究。在研究 1 中，我们表明，遗漏错误一直持续到 7 岁，并且在发 s 音的规则名词（如 dress）和不规则名词（如 man）中比在规则名词（如 dog）中更有可能出现遗漏错误。如果 s 音名词的频率较高，它们就更有可能被屈折变化。在研究 2 和研究 3 中，我们表明，类似的效果也适用于动词的屈折变化，并且具有以 d/t 结尾的“类似规则”不规则动词的屈折形式（而非词干形式）具有优势。研究结果表明：（a）词干和屈折形式在生成时相互竞争；（b）儿童在学习屈折形态学时，会同时概括基于产物和基于来源的图式。
