Singularities in inflection: Linguistic goslings or resource limitations?

I walk, you walk, he walks. It seems trivially easy to add that 's' when using a verb in the third person. However, some languages--such as Chinese--do not use any such inflection at all. Accordingly, native Chinese speakers have great difficulty producing the correct inflection in English, even after decades of practice. Why? Recent research sought to disentangle whether this is because language can only be learned during a critical period early in life, or whether those errors might be the result of processing resource limitations during speech.

Source: Psychonomic Society News - April 19, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: news