Performance of preschool children with normal language development in past tense task

The acquisition of tense inflection is a gradual process, and the children appear unaware of the significance of inflectional endings, without recognizing that there is a general rule for deriving one form from another.

To investigate the ability of past tense in children with normal language development (NLD).

The subjects were 30 children with NLD, aged between 4 and 6 years. To evaluate the use of past tense, we developed a test composed of 30 regular and irregular verbs. The analysis of the answers considered the correct ones, the replacement, overregularization and errors.

The 4 years old children with NLD had worse performance than the children of 5 and 6 years in correct answers and total score. There was no difference between the numbers of replacement based on age. By the age of 4, we observed more tense inflection errors. The overregularization errors did not differ between age groups. By the age of 4, children had more regular than irregular verbs correct answers.

The 4 years old children with NLD had worse performance than 5 and 6 years old children, because they are still improving the use of verbs in their productions. At this age, we observed tense inflection errors. The 5 and 6 years old children already master the skill of past tense and do not differenciate.