The –uns, -isms and –ings of children’s language

The word "magician", for example, is made up of two morphemes, "magic" and "ian". However the spelling of the word is very different from the way it sounds.

Language acquisition is said to be one of the most amazing of all human accomplishments, with the average 6 year old being able to remember and use anywhere from 10,000-14,000 WORDS!!!!!

Children learn language by copying others. However, once they have learnt a "rule of language" they can easily make mistakes which are very amusing to adults. This can happen  when a child has learnt a rule, eg adding –ed to the end of a word to make it past tense, and then they use it even when it isn't needed. Children don't know that some words are irregular when they change tense or don't need a morpheme added to the end, so put it there anyway. This occurs in many words including:

 Sit becomes sitted instead of sat

Drive becomes drived instead of driven

Hurt becomes hurted instead of staying the same and many more. This type of mistake is called Over-regularization.

The first words that –ed are added to are usually action verbs which the parents use most often, eg opened. Children notice that they are talking about the past so put –ed on the end of the verb. But they don't think about how many people were doing that thing so still get the words wrong.

Plurals are learned early by children but when you add plural and past tense together, children would end up saying "sitteds" which adults don't even use.

This doesn't only happen in verbs though. A ground of teachers investigated how being aware of the morphemes that make up a word can help children to spell correctly. The word "magician", for example, is made up of two morphemes, "magic" and "ian". However the spelling of the word is very different from the way it sounds. The "ian" suffix sound more like "shun" so children are likely to spell it how it sounds. This researched showed that children who know the morphemes of a word are more likely to spell it correctly than those who don't know the morphemes and spelt by sound alone.

Jean Berko Gleason created a test called The Wug test to investigate how children acquire and use plurals and other morphemes. A child is presented with some sort of pretend creature, and told, "This is a wug." Another wug is revealed, and the researcher says, "Now there are two of them. There are two...?" Children who can successfully use a plural morpheme will say Wugs.
For more informations about Wugs you can visit http://neohumanism.org/w/wu/wug_test.html.
Children learn the correct grammer as they grow older. Mistakes are always made and we can't do anything to stop them. They are amusing to us so we might as well just let a child learn in their own time. I correct people way to much and children don't understand things the way adults do.
Morphemes are very confusing little parts of speech and even adults get them wrong sometimes, even if they don't want to admit it.
By Hannah Varney