Sensitivity of Children's Inflection to Grammatical Structure

What is the input to the mental system that computes inflected forms like walked, came, dogs y and men? ? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, like stop-stopped, step-stepped and fling-flung, cling-clung. But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns like ring the city always have regular past tense forms {ringed), even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs {ring the bell). Similarly, nouns based on names, like two Mickey Mouses, and compounds based on possessing rather than being their root morpheme, such as two saber-tooths, take regular plurals, even when they are homophonous with irregular nouns like mice and teeth. In four experiments, testing 70 three- to ten-year-old children, we found that children are sensitive to such nonphonological information: they were more likely to produce regular inflected forms for forms like to ring (‘to put a ring on’) and snaggletooth (a kind of animal doll with big teeth) than for their homophonous irregular counterparts, even when these counterparts.