Have you ever heard a German child proudly announce, “Schau mal, zwei Hünde!” (“Look, two dogs!”)? To adults, the mistake sounds amusing. The correct German plural of Hund (“dog”) is Hunde. Yet the child’s error reveals something remarkable about language development. Rather than simply memorizing words, the child has already grasped that there are rules for forming plurals and is trying to apply them. After all, they have almost certainly never heard the word Hünde before. Instead, they are creatively extending a grammatical pattern they have learned, even though they have not mastered all of its exceptions yet.
It is precisely this little linguistic stumble that interests researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI-CBS) in Leipzig. They investigated what happens in the brain when children form the plural of words. "In adults, we know that very specific nerve fiber connections in the brain are important for language processing," explains first author Cheslie C. Klein. These connections function like highways in the brain and connect different language centers with each other.
