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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.

Matt
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1 Answers1

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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.

  • Thank you. It's probably a typo but not my typo. I just copied the text: link –  Sep 20 '13 at 15:28
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    @Nate The Wikipedia article you're quoting is tagged with the following text: "This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. (September 2012)" I'll go ahead and fix that one error, but there may be other mistakes on that page. –  Sep 20 '13 at 15:33
  • You're right. I'm sorry. –  Sep 20 '13 at 15:47
  • @Nate There's no need to apologize. It was perfectly fine to ask about it, in my opinion :-) –  Sep 20 '13 at 15:50
  • What about the irregular plurals that DO end in "s" like "wolves"? Pretty sure they become possessive by adding just an apostrophe. So I think this answer should probably be edited to remove the word "regular". More examples of irregular plurals are here: http://www.k12reader.com/term/irregular-plural-nouns/ – Peter Ford Jul 28 '16 at 00:45
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    @PeterFord You're right, this needs updating. It should say the regular plural suffix; wolf has a change in the base, but takes the regular plural suffix. I think this answer is probably more accurate, but I'll have to review it later to make sure: http://ell.stackexchange.com/a/74312/230 –  Jul 28 '16 at 00:46
  • I looked this up because I work with children and sometimes write about that work. Whenever I type children's, it comes up underlined in red. I thought that I was doing something wrong (not sure what) but apparently it is a glitch in the spelling program. –  Aug 11 '16 at 15:35