The Child S Learning of English Morphology
The Child S Learning of English Morphology
The Child S Learning of English Morphology
Jean Berko
To cite this article: Jean Berko (1958) The Child's Learning of English Morphology, WORD,
14:2-3, 150-177, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1958.11659661
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1958.11659661
JEAN BERKO
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. l am indebted to
Professor Roger W. Brown for his inspiration and his help in the conduct of this study.
• H. D. Rinslanfl, A Basic Fucabulary of Elementary Sehoul Children, New York,
MacMillan, 1945.
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 151
THIS IS A. WUG.
0
NOW THERE IS ANOTHER ONE.
RESULTS
Adult answers to the inflexional items were considered correct
answers, and it was therefore possible to rate the children's an-
swers. In general, adult opinion was unanimous-everyone said
the plural of *wug was *wugs, the plural of *gulch was *gulches;
where the adults differed among themselves, except in the
possessives, it was along t.he line of a common but irregular
formation, e.g. * heaf became *heaves in the plural for many spea-
kers, and in these cases both responses were considered correct.
If a child said that the plural of * heaf was * heafs or *heaves
f-vzf, he was considered correct. If he said *heaf (no ending),
or * heafes j-fazj, he was considered incorrect, and a record was
kept of each type of response.
SEX DIFFERENCES
The first question to be answered was whether there is a sex
difference in the ability to handle English morphology at this age
level. Since it seemed entirely possible that boys entering the
first grade might be on the whole somewhat older than girls entering
the first grade, it was necessary to equate the two groups for age.
TABLE 1. DISTRIBUTION OF CHILDREN AT EACH AGE LEVEL
FOR COMPARISON OF THE SEXES
Age Boy:: Girls Total
4 2 2 4
4:6 1 1 2
5 2 2 4
5:6 2 2 4
6 10 10 20
6:6 6 6 12
7 5 5 10
-- -- --
Total: 28 28 56
The children were divided into seven age groups. Since at
each of these levels there were more girls than boys, a random
selection of the girls was made so that they would match the boys
in number. The distribution of these ages and the number in
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 159
AGE DIFFERENCES
between /f/ and the sibilants did not lead the children to
generalize the rule for the addition of the f-azf allomorph in that
direction. Nor could any irregular formation be said to be
productive for children in this case, although for adults it appar-
ently is.
The proportion of children's right answers suddenly drops when
we come to the form *lass. As table 3 shows, 91 % of these
children when given the form glass could produce the form
glasses. When given the form *lass, a new word patterned after
glass, only 36 % could supply the form *lasses. The picture
becomes progressively worse with the other words ending in
sibilants or affricates, and by the time we reach the form * niz,
only 28 % answered correctly. * N iz of these four, is the only
one that ends in a sound that is also the commonest plural
allomorph, /-z/, and the children did the worst on this item. What
i.s of additional interest, is that on these four items there was no
significant improvement from the preschool to the first grade.
The difference between performance on *era, the worst of the other
items, and *lass, the best of these, was significant at the .1 %level.
Again, the wrong answers consisted in doing nothing to the word
as given. It must be noted, however, that in these items, the
children delivered the wrong form wit.h a great deal of conviction:
62 % of them said "one *lass, two *lass" as if there were no
question that the plural of *lass should and must be *lass. From
this it is evident that the morphological rules these children have
for the plural are not the same as those possessed by adults:
the children can add f-sf or f-z/ to new words with a great deal
of success. They do not as yet have the ability to extend the
f-azf allomorph to new words, even though it has been
demonstrated that they have words of this type in their
vocabulary.
The form "kazh" fkrezf was added chere once again to see in what
direction the children would generalize. fzf, although it is in the
sibilant-affricate group, is very rare as a final consonant. in
English: it occurs only in some speakers' pronunciation of garage,
barrage, and a few other words. As table 3 indicates, the children
treated this word like the others of this group. It might also be
noted here that for the forms *gulch and * kazh. some few children
formed the plural in /-s/, i.e., /gAcs/ and fkrezsf. 10 % did this
for *gulch, and 5 % f.or * kazh, errors that indicate that the phono-
logical rules may not yet be perfectly learned. What is clearest
from these answers dealing with the plural is that children can and
164 JEAN BERKO
do extend the j-sf and j-zj forms to new words, and that they cannot
apply the more complicated j-gzj allomorph of the plural to new
words.
VERB INFLEXIONS
The children's performance on the verb forms can be seen in
Table 4. It will be observed that the best performance on these
items was on the progressive, where they were shown a picture of
a man who knew how to * zib and were required to say that he was
* zihhing. The difference between * zihhing and the best of the
past tense items, *hinged, was significant at the 5 % level. The
improvement from the younger to the older group was significant
at the 1 % level; fully 97 % of the first graders answered this
question correctly. Here, there was no question of choice,
there is only one allomorph of the progressive morpheme, and the
child either knows this -ing form or does not. These results
suggest that he does.
The results with the past tense forms indicate that these
children can handle the /-t/ and /-d/ allomorphs of the past. On
*hinged and * glinged the percentages answering correctly were
78 and 77, and the older group did significantly better than the
younger group on *hinged.
Progressive
zibbing /-in/ 90
Past Tense
hinged, bang f-d ('.) re +-- (i)/ 78
glinged, glang f-d l'.)re +-- (i)/ 77
ricked /-t/ 73
melted j-gdj 73
spowed /-d/ 52
motted j-adj 33
bodded f-adf 31
rang /re+-( i) / 17
Third Singular
loodges f-azf 56
nazzes j-azf 48
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 165
Actually, the forms * gling and *bing were included to test for
possible irregular formations. A check of English verbs revealed
that virtually all in -ing form their past tense irregularly: sing:
sang; ring: rang; cling: clung, and many others. The only
-ing verbs that form a past tense in -ed are a few poetic forms like
enringed, unkinged, and winged, and onomotopoeias like pinged
and zinged. Adults clearly felt the pull of the irregular pattern,
and 50 % of them said *bang or *bung for the past tense of *bing,
while 75 % made * gling into * glang or * glung in the past. Only
one child of the 86 interviewed on these items said *bang. One
also said * glang, and two said * g/anged-changing the vowel and
also adding the regular /-d/ for the past.
The great majority on these forms, as well as on *ricked which
requires f-tf, formed the past tense regularly. There was a certain
amount of room for variation with the past tense, since there is
more than one way of expressing what happened in the past.
A number of children, for example said "Yesterday he was
* ricking". If on these occasions the experimenter tried to force
the issue by saying "He only did it once yesterday, so yesterday
once he-?" The child usually responded with "once he was
* ricking". Taking into account this possible variation, the
percentages right on *rick, * gling and *bing represent a substantial
grasp of the problem of adding a phonologically determined f-tf
or /-df.
With * spow the child had to choose one or the other of the
allomorphs, and the drop to 52 % correct represents this
additional complexity. Several children here retained the
inflexional f-zf and said fspowzd/, others repeated the progressive
or refused to answer. No child supplied a f-tf.
On *moiled, the percentage correct drops to 33, although the
subjects were 73 %right on the real word melted, which is a similar
form. On * bodded they were 31 %right, and on rang only 17 %
right. The older group was significantly better than the younger
on rang and * bodded. What this means is that the younger group
could not do them at all-not one preschool child knew rang-
and the older group could barely do them. What emerges here
is that children at this age level are not able to extend the rule for
forming the past tense of melted to new forms. They can handle
the regular /-d/ and /-t/ allomorphs of the past in new instances,
but not f-~df. Nor do they have control of the irregular past form
rang, and consequently do not form new pasts according to this
pattern, although adults do. They have the /-~d/ form in actual
3-1
166 .JEAN BERKO
words like melled, but do not generalize from it. With ring, they
do not have the actual past rang, and, therefore no model for
generalization. In the children's responses, the difference
between *spowd, the worst of the items requiring f-tf or /-d/, and
*molted, the best requiring f-ad/ is significant at the 2 % level.
For *mot and *bod, the wrong answers, which were in the majority,
were overwhelmingly a repetition of the present stem: "Today
he • bods; yesterday he • bod." To the forms ending in j-tf or
/-d/ the children added nothing to form the past.
The third person singular forms require the same allomorphs
as the noun plurals, /-S"-·-'f;N-azj, and only two examples were
included in the experiment. These were *loodge and * naz, and
required the J-azf ending. 56 % of the children supplied the
correct form *loodges, and 48 % supplied *nazzes. The wrong
answers were again a failure to add anything to the stem, and there
was no improvement whatsoever from the younger to the older
group on these two items.
an adult may know a family named Lyons, and also a family named
Lyon. In the first instance, the family are the Lyonses f-z~zf
and if they own a house, it is the Lyonses' f-z~zf house; in the second
instance, the family are the Lyons and their house is the Lyons'
J-nzf. The confusion resulting from competing forms like these
is such that some speakers do not make this distinction, and simply
add nothing to a proper noun ending in /-s/ or /-z/ in order to form
the possessive-they say "it is Charles' /-lz/ hat". Some
speakers seem also to have been taught in school that they must use
this latter form. It seems likely that the children interviewed
had not enough grasp of the /-~z/ form for these niceties to affect
them.
TABLE 5. PERCENTAGES OF CHILDREN SUPPLYING
CORRECT POSSESSIVE FORMS
Singular Allomorph Percentage Correct
wug's f-zf 84
bik's /-sf 87
niz's 1-~z/ 49
Plural
wugs' f-1i'J I 88
biks' f-1i'J I 93
nizzes' f-1i'J I 76
ADJECTIVAL INFLEXION
The last of the inflexional items involved attempting to elicit
comparative and superlative endings for the adjective *quirky.
The child was shown dogs that were increasingly *quirky and
expected to say that the second was *quirkier than the first, and
that the third was the *quirkiest. No statistical count was
necessary here since of the 80 children shown this picture, only one
answered with these forms. Adults were unanimous in their
answers. Children either said they did not know, or they repeated
the experimenter's word, and said "*quirky, too". If the child
failed to answer, the experimenter supplied the form *quirkier,
and said "This dog is quirky. This dog is quirkier. And this
dog is the --?" Under these conditions 35 % of the children
could supply the -est form.
DERIVATION AND CoMPOUNDING
The children were also asked several questions that called for
168 JEAN BERKO
After the child had been asked all of these questions calling for
the manipulation of new forms, he was asked about some of the
compound words in his own vocabulary; the object of this
questioning was to see if children at this age are aware of the
separate morphemes in compound words. The children's
explanations fall roughly into four categories. The first is
identity: "a blackboard is called a blackboard because it is a
blackboard." The second is a statement of the object's salient
function or feature: "a blackboard is called a blackboard because you
write on it." In the third type of explanation, the salient feature
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 169
had ever told him what it was. This was decidedly not the
case. The children answered the questions; in some instances
they pronounced the inflexional endings they had added with
exaggerated care, so that it was obvious that they understood
the problem and wanted no mistake made about their solution.
Sometimes, they said "That's a hard one," and pondered a while
before answering, or answered with one form and then corrected
themselves. The answers were not always right so far as English
is concerned; but they were consistent and orderly answers, and
they demonstrated that there can be no doubt that children in
this age range operate with clearly delimited morphological
rules.
Our second finding was that boys and girls did equally well on
these items. Sometimes the girls had a higher percentage of right
answers on an item, and more often the boys did somewhat better,
but no pattern of differences could be distinguished and the diffe-
rences were never statistically significant. These findings are
at variance with the results of most other language tests. Usually,
girls have been shown to have a slight advantage over boys.
In our experiment, girls were no more advanced than boys in their
acquisition of English morphology. Since other language tests
have not investigated morphology per se, it is easy enough to say
that this is simply one area in which there are no sex differences.
A reason for this lack of difference does, however, suggest itself:
and that is the very basic nature of morphology. Throughout
childhood, girls are perhaps from a maturational point of view
slightly ahead of the boys who are their chronological age mates.
But the language differences that have been observed may be
culturally induced, and they may be fairly superficial. Some
social factor may lead girls to be more facile with words, to use
longer sentences, and to talk more. This can be misleading.
A girl in an intellectual adult environment may, for instance,
acquire a rather sophisticated vocabulary at an early age. This
should not be taken to mean that she will learn the minor rules f::>r
the formation of the plural before she learns the major ones, or
that she will necessarily be precocious in her acquisition of those
rules. What is suggested here is that every child is in contact
with a sufficiently varied sample of spoken English in order for
him to be exposed at an early age to the basic morphological
processes. These processes occur in simple sentences as well as in
complex ones. Practice with a limited vocabulary may be
as effective as practice with an extensive vocabulary, and the
172 JEAN BERKO
is not yet productive, and the /-s/ form can be subsumed under a
more general phonological rule.
What we are saying here is that the child's rule for the formation
of the plural seems to be: "a final sibilant makes a word plural".
The question that arises is, should we not rather say that the
child's rule is: "a voiceless sibilant after a voiceless consonant and
a voiced sibilant after all other sounds makes a word plural."
This latter describes what the child actually does. However,
our rule will cover the facts if it is coupled with a prior phonological
rule about possible final sound sequences. The choice of the
voiceless or voiced variant can generally be subsumed under
phonological rules about final sound sequences; the exceptions
are after vowels, semi vowels, and /I- n- r-f. In these places where
phonology leaves a choice, f-zf is used, and so the child's conscious
rule might be to add f-zf. It would be interesting to find out
what lhe child thinks he is saying-if we could in some way ask
him the general question, ''how do you make the plural?"
Another point of phonology was illustrated by the children's
treatment of the forms * heaf and * kazh. It was demonstrated
here that the children have phonological rules, and the direction
of their generalizations was dictated by English phonology, and
not simple phonetic similarity. f-zf is a comparatively rare
phoneme, and yet they apparently recognized it as belonging to the
sibilant series in English, and they rarely attempted to follow it
with another sibilant. The similarity between jf/ and the sibilants,
did not, on the contrary cause them to treat it as a member of
this class. The final thing to be noted about * heaf is that several
children and many adults said the plural was *heaves. This may
be by analogy with leaf: leaves. If our speculation that the
f-zf form is the real morphological plural is right, there may be
cases where instead of becoming devoiced itself, it causes regressive
assimilation of the final voiceless copsonant.
The allomorphs of the third person singular of the verb and the
possessives of the noun are the same as for l!.e noun plural, except
that the plural possessives have an additional zero allomorph.
These forms were treated in the same way by the children, with
one notable exception: they were more successful in adding the
f-~zf to form possessives and verbs than they were in forming noun
plurals. They were asked to produce three nearly identical
iorms: a man who *nazzes; two *nizzes; and a *niz's hat. On
the verb they were 48 % right; on the possessive they were 49 %
right, and on the noun plural they were only 28 % right. The
174 JEAN BERKO
win and swim that are quite regular in the past: pin and trim.
But virtually all of the verbs that end in -ing form their past in
-ang or -ung. There are approximately 10 of these -ing verbs.
The productivity of the -ang and -ung forms proves that new
forms are not necessarily assimilated to the largest productive
class. Where a small group of common words exist as a category
by virtue of their great phonetic similarity and their morphological
consistency, a new word having the same degree of phonetic simi-
larity may be treated according to this special rule. Ox : oxen
is not similarly productive, but probably would be if there were
just one other form like box : boxen, and the competing fox : foxes
did not exist. With *mot~ the zero allomorph is not productive
because although it applies to more cases than are covered by
the -ing verbs, it is not so good a rule in the sense that it is not so
consistent. The final /-t/, which is the only common phonetic
element, does not invariably lead to a zero allomorph, as witness
pit : pitted, pat : patted, and many others.
Although the adults were uniform in their application of -er
and -est to form the comparative and superlative of the adjective,
children did :qot seem to have these patterns under control unless
they were given both the adjective and the comparative form.
With this information, some of them could supply the superlative.
Derivation is likewise a process little used by children at this
period when the derivational endings would compete with the
inflexional suffixes they are in the process of acquiring. Instead,
they compound words, using the primary and tertiary accent pat-
tern commonly found in words like blackboard.
The last part of the experiment was designed to see if the children
were aware of the separate elements in the compound words in
their vocabulary. Most of these children were at the stage where
they explained an object's name by stating its major function or
salient feature: a blackboard is called a blackboard because you
write on it. In the older group, a few children had noticed the
separate parts of the compound words and assigned to them mean-
ings that were not necessarily connected with the word's etymo-
logy or with the meaning the morphemes may have in later life.
Not many adults feel that Friday is the day for frying things,
yet a number admit to having thought so as children.
These last considerations were, however, tangential to the main
problem of investigating the child's grasp of English morphological
rules and describing the evolution of those rules. The picture that
emerged was one of consistency, regularity, and simplicity. The
THE CHILD'S LEARNING OF ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY 177