The Role of Phonology in Children's Acquisition of the Plural

The correct use of an affix, such as the English plural suffix, may reflect mastery of a morphological process, but it may also depend on children's syntactic, semantic, and phonological abilities. The present article reports a set of experiments in support of this latter view, specifically focusing on the importance of the phonological make-up of plural forms for both production and comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2, plural productions were elicited from 80 two-year-old children for nouns with codas with varying phonological properties. The results provide evidence that production of the plural morpheme is partly governed by the complexity of the coda and its sonority. Experiments 3 and 4 show that these constraints on codas hold for comprehension as well, suggesting that this effect is not simply articulatory, but also impacts the morphophonology of the plural.