When do children begin to pay attention to word endings?
In English, we sometimes add sounds to the end of a word to modify its meaning. For example, changing the word ‘cat’ to ‘cats’ tells other people we are talking about more than one cat, whilst changing the word ‘walk’ to ‘walked’ tells people we are talking about an action that happened in the past. Some of the current studies in the BabyLab examine children’s sensitivity to such endings. We are trying to find out if they hear the difference between the singular and the plural, and when they begin to understand what this means.
