Little language learners
29 Apr 2008
A study by psychologists at the University of Liverpool has discovered that children as young as six are as adept at recognising possible verbs and their past tenses as adults.
Children aged between six and nine were given a number of sentences containing made-up words, such as ‘the duck likes to spling’. They were asked to judge the acceptability of the word in its past-tense form. Rather than whether an answer was right or wrong, the study focused on the processes children used to come to their conclusion.
The research revealed that the children’s conclusions followed a near identical pattern to those of linguistics students who undertook a study at the University of California in Los Angeles.
University of Liverpool psychologist, Ben Ambridge, said: ‘Previous studies have concentrated on getting children to produce past tense forms for made-up words. This study is unique in that the children were asked to judge the acceptability of different forms that we gave them.
‘One of the main questions raised when looking at children’s ability to pick up their native language is whether abstract symbolic rules or the use of memory and comparison affect how a child attributes past tenses to words.
‘The study was designed to investigate whether we coin novel past-tense forms like ‘emailed’ by applying the default rule of adding ‘ed’ to the present-tense form or by making an analogy with similar-sounding words stored in the memory, for example in the way we know to form ‘sailed’ from ‘sail’ by linking it to like-sounding words such as ‘tail’ or ‘fail’. The study found evidence for the latter, supporting the view that we solve problems by making analogies with similar events stored in our memory rather than by applying abstract mental rules.’
He added: ‘Grammaticality judgements are generally used by adult linguists so it’s impressive that children have been able to make them. They can’t tell you how they do it, but even six-year-olds know when a made-up word just doesn’t sound right.’
