When level-ordering is not used in the formation of English compounds

Abstract

To explain the fact that children avoid using regular plurals in modifiers of English compounds by three years, it has been argued that level-ordering constrains all their compounds (e.g., Gordon, 1985). If so, children should avoid regular plurals in ungrammatical compounds like Verb-Object and Verb-Object-er which they use while acquiring grammatical Object-Verb-er compounds (like ‘truck driver’). Children between 3 and 5 years were asked to form novel compounds describing machines acting on objects. The first study included 42 English monolingual children and the second study 36 French-English bilingual children. Both groups of children used significantly more regular plurals in ungrammatical compounds than in grammatical compounds. These results suggest that the avoidance of regular plurals is learned in conjunction with learning the kinds of compounds English allows.