Autor: Rosie Mejia

In this study, we look at how children learn a special class of sound sequences in English, namely, ones that are only possible when one of the sounds belongs to a suffix. For example, wugd cannot be the name of a novel species of animal, but if wug is a novel verb, its past tense wugd is a perfectly acceptable word. During the experiment, the child will listen to lists of words that contain these special sequences as well as words that cannot be possible English words, while sitting on a parent’s lap in the sound booth. We will compare how much they pay attention to the two types of words, and the results would shed light on the learning of sound patterns and how they interact with suffix learning.