Dye, C. 1, 3 , Walenski, M. 2 , Prado, B. . 3 , Mostofsky, S. . 4 & Ullman, M. 3
1 University of Salford
2 University of California San Diego
3 Georgetown University
4 Johns Hopkins University
Language requires both storage and composition. However, exactly what is memorized and what is assembled remains controversial. Inflectional morphology and particularly examination of regular and irregular past tense forms have been a fertile terrain for investigating this issue. Recent work showed that in adults the storage vs. composition of past tense forms is influenced by factors such as frequency and imagebility, with frequency being the most important. The aim of the present study was to examine how such factors might affect storage vs. composition in children. Fifty-three normally developing children with ages ranging from 8 to 12 were tested on a past tense production task which involved 32 regular forms (e.g., fail-failed) and 32 irregular forms (e.g., hold-held). Results indicate that children generally resemble adults, however, in children imageability seems to play a more important role. Details of the analysis and results are presented, along with discussion and implications.