In the sentence below, are the usages of apostrophes correct?
In research about parent stereotypes, the correlation between parents’ beliefs about their early elementary age children’s’ mathematics abilities and the children’s actual abilities increased as children aged.
Answer
No. The rule is simple:
- For regular plurals ending in
s, the possessive suffix is'. - In all other cases, the suffix is
's.
Children is an irregular plural, not a regular one. Therefore, the suffix is 's, and the possessive form is children's. Your form *children's' is incorrect.
However, the other possessive forms are fine. Parents is a regular plural, so the possessive suffix is simply '. That means parents' is correct. And you correctly write children's later in the same sentence. (Was your earlier mistake a typo?)
In this answer, the * symbol means that the spelling is considered incorrect.
No comments:
Post a Comment