children’s tolerance of word-form variation词形式变异的孩子的宽容.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Child Development Research Volume 2012, Article ID 401680, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2012/401680 Research Article Children’s Tolerance of Word-Form Variation Paul R. Bruening,1 Patricia J. Brooks,1 Louis Alfieri,2 3 ˇ ˙4 Vera Kempe, and Ineta Dabasinskiene 1 Department of Psychology, College of Staten Island, City University of New York, 2800 Victory Boulevard, 4S-108, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA 2 Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O’Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA 3 Division of Psychology, University of Abertay Dundee, Bell Street, Dundee, Scotland DD1 1HG, UK 4 Division of Humanities, Vytautas Magnus University, Donelaicio 58, 44248 Kaunas, Lithuania Correspondence should be addressed to Patricia J. Brooks, patricia.brooks@ Received 26 July 2012; Accepted 8 October 2012 Academic Editor: Annie Vinter Copyright © 2012 Paul R. Bruening et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. How much morphological variation can children tolerate when identifying familiar words? This is an important question in the context of the acquisition of richly inflected languages where identical word forms occur far less frequently than in English. To address this question, we compared children’s (N = 96, mean age 4;1, range 2;11–5;1) and adults’ (N = 96, mean age 21 years) tolerance of word-onset modifications (e.g., for stug: wug and wastug ) and pseudoaffixes (e.g., kostug and stugko) in a label- extension task. Word-form mo