The study investigates whether Italian verbal inflectional morphology is associated with inhibitory control skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory. A sample of Italian preschoolers aged 4;0 to 6;0 was assessed using a standardized inhibitory control task tapping two different inhibitory skills (response inhibition and interference suppression), and a morphological task requiring simple and complex inflections of verbs. The hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that working memory and the interference suppression scores were significantly associated with complex inflections but not with simple inflections of the verbs.

Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grades 2–5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (“ik vind,” I find) or -dt (“hij/zij vindt,” he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as “vind’ is more frequent than “vindt,” “vind” is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.

This study investigates the acquisition of the Imperfective verb inflection paradigm in Emirati Arabic (EA), to determine whether the learning process is sensitive to the phonological and typological properties of the input. We collected data from 48 participants aged 2;7 to 5;9 years, using an elicited production paradigm. Input frequencies of inflectional contexts, verb types and tokens were obtained from corpora of child-directed and adult EA. Children's accuracy was inversely related to the input frequency of inflectional contexts, but not related to type and token frequency or phonological neighborhood density. Token frequency interacted with age, such that younger children performed considerably worse on low-frequency tokens, but older children performed equally well on high- and low-frequency tokens. We conclude that learning is input-driven, but that a sufficiently regular paradigm allows children to eventually generalise across all items earlier than in previously studied European languages.