The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language

Abstract

We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by  Spanish-speaking children (age range :  ;  to  ; ) taken from longitudinal and cross-sectional samples of spontaneous speech and narratives. Our main observation is the existence of a dissociation between regular and irregular processes in the distribution of errors : regular suffixes and unmarked (non-alternating) stems are over-extended to irregulars in children's inflection errors, but not vice versa. We also found that overregularization errors at all ages are only a small minority of the children's irregular verbs, that the period of overregularization is preceded by a stage without errors, and that the onset of overregularizations is connected to the emergence of obligatory finiteness markings. These findings are explained in terms of the dual-mechanism model of inflection. The question of how inflected word forms are mentally represented, processed and acquired has been the subject of a debate in which -broadly speaking -two competing classes of theories can be distinguished. On one side is the so-called dual mechanism account according to which regular and irregular inflection are dissociated in children's grammars in basically the

The perfective past tense in Greek child language

“…These differences are suggestive of a U-shaped trend in the development of sigmatic past-tense overapplications in Greek, similarly to what was found for the development of overregularizations in other languages (see e.g. Marcus et al 1992 for English, andClahsen et al 2002 for Spanish). Table 8 shows mean percentages (and standard deviations) of the participants' responses for rhyming novel verbs.…”

Errors of Omission in English‐Speaking Children's Production of Plurals and the Past Tense: The Effects of Frequency, Phonology, and Competition

“…The dual-route model of inflection (Clahsen, 1999;Clahsen, Aveledo, & Roca, 2002;Clahsen, Rothweiler, & Woest, 1999;Marcus, 1995aMarcus, , 1995bMarcus et al, 1992;Pinker, 1999;Pinker & Prince, 1988;Pinker & Ullman, 2002) proposes that irregularly inflected words (e.g., mice) are stored in an associative memory, whereas the inflection of regular words (e.g., houses) is computed by a default rule (e.g., "add -s" for English plurals) that combines a symbol for a stem with a symbol for a suffix. Before the default rule is acquired, if a child does not have an appropriate inflected form in memory, then she or he will be forced to utter a bare stem in its place (Pinker, 1999), and therefore, errors of omission may occur prior to the acquisition of a rule.…”

Contributions of linguistic typology to psycholinguistics

“…This pattern holds for all other errors of this kind in that there was no single case of a conjugation class error in such cases. For example, errors such as *devolv-a-do, i.e., a regularized form of devuel-t-o with the first conjugation theme vowel -awere nonexistent in the large data set examined by Clahsen et al (2002). These cases indicate that in children's morphological errors the formation of stems can be dissociated from root-related and inflectional processes.…”