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The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language
Harald Clahsen1, Fraibet Aveledo, Iggy Roca
1Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK.
Abstract:
We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by 15 Spanish-speaking children (age range: 1;7 to 4;7) 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 over-regularizations is connected to the emergence of obligatory finiteness markings. These findings are explained in terms of the dual-mechanism model of inflection.
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