Phonological Constraints on Children’s Use of the Plural

The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural or past tense suffixes, is generally assumed to reflect mastery of the relevant morphological process. An alternate view holds that the use of an affix reflects not only morphological competence, but also additional factors including syntactic, semantic and phonological abilities. The present paper reports on a set of experiments in support of this latter view specifically examining the role of phonology on English-speaking children’s ability to produce the plural. Plural productions were elicited from two-year-olds for nouns with different codas, or endings (e.g. dogs vs. keys). The results provide evidence that the production of the plural morpheme –s is partly governed by children’s developing ability to articulate or perceive the phonological form of the plural. This supports a model of language learning in which the acquisition of different components of grammar interact with each other versus a model that is exclusively modular