The Relationship between the Development of Regular Past Tense Endings and the Final Consonant Clusters Encoding them

This study explored the relationship between phonology and syntax by examining the development of regular past tense endings in relation to the acquisition of the final consonant clusters needed to encode them correctly. Forty children between three and six-years-old were tested in their mastery of the past tense ending. Four groups of ten subjects, formed on the basis of degree of mastery, were then tested in their ability to produce final consonant clusters in words with the past tense ending and words without the past tense ending. It was proposed that articulation of clusters would be poorer in words with the morphological ending and that children with better mastery of the morphological ending would experience less articulation difficulties when encoding this form. However, it was found that the presence of the past tense inflection had no significant effect on articulation. Furthermore, children with better mastery of past tense were not significantly better at encoding this form than were those with poor mastery. These results may have occurred because the subjects studied had almost mastered consonant clusters and this structure was therefore more resistant to syntactic influences. Furthermore, increasing syntactic complexity at the single word level did not appear to he significant enough to affect articulation.