Continuity in lexical and morphological development: a test of the critical mass hypothesis

Several recent studies have demonstrated strong relationships between lexical acquisition and subsequent developments within the domain of morphosyntax. A connectionist model of the acquisition of a morphological system analogous to that of the English past tense (Plunkett & Marchman, 1993) suggests that growth in vocabulary size may relate to the onset of over-regularization errors. However, this model suggests that the relationships between vocabulary size and morphosyntactic development are non-linear. Incremental increases in the number of verbs to be learned result in qualitative shifts in the treatment of both previously learned and novel forms, but only after the size of the lexicon exceeds a particular level (i.e. reaches a 'critical mass'). In this paper we present parental report data from an extensive study of English-speaking children aged 1;4 to 2;6 using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Toddler form (N = 1130). These data corroborate several findings from previous studies, including the early usage of unmarked verb stems and the correct production of irregular past tense forms. Further, we demonstrate support for the 'critical mass' view of the onset of over-regularization errors, focusing on continuity among lexical and morphological developments. In our view, these data suggest that these linguistic milestones may be paced by similar, if not identical mechanisms.