THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY
JEAN BERKO
In this study
1
we set out to discover what is learned by children
exposed to English morphology. To test for knowledge of morpho-
logical rules, we use nonsense materials. We know that if the
subject can supply the correct plural ending, for instance, to a
noun we have made up, he has internalized a working system of the
plural allomorphs in English, and is able to generalize to new
cases and select the right form. If a child knows that the plural
of witch is witches, he may simply have memorized the plural
form. If, however, he tells us that the plural of * gutch is * gutches,
we have evidence that he actually knows, albeit unconsciously,
one of those rules which the descriptive linguist, too, would set
forth in his grammar. And if children do have knowledge of mor-
phological rules, how does this knowledge evolve? Is there a pro-
gression from simple, regular rules to the more irregular and quali-
fied rules that are adequate fully to describe English? In very
general terms, we undertake to discover the psychological status of
a certain kind of linguistic description. It is evident that the
acquisition of language is more than the storing up of rehearsed
utterances, since we are all able to say what we have not practiced
and what we have never before heard. In bringing descriptive
linguistics to the study of language acquisition, we hope to gain
knowledge of the systems and patterns used by the speaker.
In order to test for children's knowledge of this sort, it was
necessary to begin with an examination of their actual vocabulary.
Accordingly, the 1000 most frequent words in the first-grader's
vocabulary were selected from Rinsland's listing.
2
This listing
1
This investigation was supported in part by a fellowship from the Social Science
Research Council. During the academic year 1957-58 the writer completed the
research while holding an AAUW National Fellowship. A dissertation on this subject
was presented by the writer to Radcliffe College in April, 1958. I am. indebted to
Professor Roger W. Brown for his inspiration and his help in the conduct of this study.
2
H. D. Rinsland, A Basic Vocabulary of Elementary School Children, New York,
MacMillan, 1945.
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY
151
contains the most common words in the elementary school child's
vocabulary, as taken from actual conversations, compositions,
letters, and similar documents. This list was then examined to
see what features of English morphology seem to be most commonly
represented in the vocabulary of the first-grade child. From this
we could decide what kind of extensions we might expect the child
to be able to make. All of the English inflectional morphemes
were present.
The areas that seemed to be most promising from this exami-
nation were the plural and the two possessives of the noun, the
third person singular of the verb, the progressive and the past
tense, and the comparative and superlative of the adjective.
The pronouns were avoided both because of the difficulty involved
in making up a nonsense pronoun, and because the pronouns are
so few in number and so irregular that we would hardly expect
even adults to have any generalized rules for the handling of new
pronouns. Moreover, we do not encounter new pronouns, whereas
new verbs, adjectives, and nouns constantly appear in our voca-
bularies, so that the essential problem is not the same. The past
participle of regular or weak verbs in English is identical with the
past tense, and since the regular forms were our primary interest,
no attempt was made to test for the past participle. A number
of forms that might suggest irregular plurals and past tenses were
included among the nouns and verbs.
The productive allomorphs of the plural, the possessive, and the
third person singular of the verb are phonologically conditioned
and identical with one another. These forms are /-s –z -əz/, with
the following distribution:
/-əz/ after stems that end in/s z š č ĵ]/, e.g.
glasses, watches;
/-s/ after stems that end in /p t k f Ө/, e.g.
hops, hits;
/-z/ after all other stems, viz. those ending in /b d g v
ð
m n
ŋ
r l /,
vowels, and semivowels, e.g.
bids, goes.
The productive allomorphs of the past are /t ~ d ~ əd/, and
they are also phonologically conditioned, with the following
distribution:
/-əd/ after stems that end in /t d/, e.g.
melted;
/-t/ after stems that end in /p k č f Ө š /, e.g.
stopped;
/-d/ after stems ending in voiced sounds except /-d/. e.g.
climbed,
played.
The progressive
-ing
and the adjective
-er
and
-est
do not have
variants. It might also be noted that the possessive has an
152 JEAN BERKO
additional allomorph /-Ø/; this occurs after an inflectional /-
s/ or /-z/, so that if the form boy is made plural, boys, the
possessive of that plural form is made by adding nothing, and
indicated in writing only by the addition of an apostrophe: boys'.
The children's vocabulary at the first-grade level also contains
a number of words that are made of a free morpheme and a deri-
vational suffix, e.g. teacher, or of two free morphemes, e.g.
birthday. The d faculties encountered in this area are many.
First, it might be noted that there are not many contrasts, i.e.,
not many cases of the same derivational suffix being added to
different bases to produce forms of like function. Although
beautiful and thankful both appear on the list, it does not seem that
these examples are numerous enough for us to expect a young
child to be able to append -ful to a new noun in order to produce
an adjective. Word derivation and compounding are furthermore
often accompanied by changes in stress and pronunciation, so
that the picture is additionally complicated. There seemed to
be enough examples of the stress pattern ' \ as in bláckboàrd
as against blàck boárd, and of the diminutive-affectionate -y,
the adjectival -y, and the agentive -er to warrant testing for these
forms.
So far as the general picture is concerned, all speakers of the
language are constrained to use the inflectional endings and apply
them appropriately to new forms when they are encountered.
We are not so often called upon to derive or compound new words,
although by the time we are adults we can all to some extent do
this. From the children's actual vocabulary we were able to
make an estimate of the kind of morphological rules they might be
expected to possess, and from these items a test could be cons-
tructed. It was noted, moreover, that in the child's vocabulary
there are a number of compound words, like blackboard and
birthday. It is entirely possible to use a compound word correctly
and never notice that it is made of two separate and meaningful
elements. It is also possible to use it correctly and at the same
time have a completely private meaning for one or both of its
constituent elements. In order to see what kind of ideas children
have about the compound words in their vocabularies, it was
decided to ask them directly about a selected number of these
words.
Within the framework of the child's vocabulary, a test was
devised to explore the child's ability to apply morphological rules
to new words. He was called upon to inflect, to derive, to
compound, and, lastly, to analyse compound words.
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 153
MATERIALS AND PROCEDURE
In order to test for the child's use of morphological rules of
different types and under varying phonological conditions, a
number of nonsense words were made up, following the rules for
possible sound combinations in English. Pictures to represent
the nonsense words were then drawn on cards. There were
27 picture cards, and the pictures, which were brightly colored,
depicted objects, cartoon-like animals, and men performing
various actions. For reasons that will be discussed later, several
actual words were also included. A text, omitting the desired
form, was typed on each card. An example of the card to test
for the regular plural allomorph in /-z/ can be seen in Figure 1.
The subjects included 12 adults (seven women and five men),
all of whom were college graduates. Many of these adults had
also had some graduate training. All were native speakers of
English.
The child subjects were obtained at the Harvard Preschool
in Cambridge and the Michael Driscoll School, in Brookline,
Massachusetts. At the Preschool, each child was brought to
the experimenter, introduced, and told that now he was going
to look at some pictures. The experimenter would point to
the picture and read the text. The child would supply the
missing word, and the item he employed was noted phonemically.
After all of the pictures had been shown, the child was asked why
he thought the things denoted by the compound words were so
named. The general form of these questions was "Why do you
think a blackboard is called a blackboard?" If the child responded
with ''Because it's a blackboard", he was asked, "But why do you
think it's called that?" The children at the preschool ranged
between four and five years in age. Twelve girls and seven boys
were asked all items of the completed test, and two groups, one
of three boys and three girls and one of five boys and three girls,
were each asked half of the inflectional items in preliminary
testing.
At the Driscoll School, the experimenter was introduced to the
class and it was explained that each child was going to have a turn
at looking at some pictures. The procedure from this point on
was the same as for the Preschool. All children in the first grade
were interviewed. There were 26 boys and 35 girls in this group.
Ages ranged from five and one half to seven years.
154
JEAN BERKO
Figure 1. The plural allomorph in /-z/.
