Intuitive Grammar Develops By Age Six, Say Researchers

In a study conducted by the University's Child Rosetta stone
Language Study Centre, children aged between six and nine were given sentences containing made-up verbs such as 'the duck likes to spling' and were asked to judge the acceptability of possible past tense forms. The study focused on the process the children used to come to their conclusions rather than whether their answers were right or wrong.They found that the children's judgements followed a virtually identical pattern to those of linguistics students who took part in a similar study at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US.University of Liverpool psychologist, Ben Ambridge, said: Previous studies have concentrated on getting children to produce past tense forms for made-up words. This study is unique in that theRosetta Stone Chinese

children were asked to judge the acceptability of different forms that we gave them.One of the main questions raised when looking at children's ability to pick up their native language is whether abstract symbolic rules or the use of memory and comparison affect how a child attributes past tenses to words.The study was designed to investigate whether we coin novel past-tense forms like 'emailed' by applying the default rule of adding 'ed' to the present-tense form or by making an analogy with similar-sounding words stored in the memory, for example in the way we know to form 'sailed' from 'sail' by linking it to like-sounding words such as 'tail' or 'fail'. The study found evidence for the Rosetta Stone Chinese Levev 1-3
latter, supporting the view that we solve problems by making analogies with similar events stored in our memory rather than by applying abstract mental rules.He added: Grammaticality judgements are generally used by adult linguists so it's impressive that children have been
able to make them. They can't tell you how they do it, but even six-year-olds know
when a made-up word just doesn't sound right.