Children's overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Children's language acquisition involves learning grammatical rules and exceptions.
• Overregularization errors (e.g., "foots" instead of "feet") provide insights into this process.
• Comparing connectionist and symbolic models is crucial for understanding language development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantitatively analyze children's noun plural overregularizations.
• To compare noun plural overregularization with past tense overregularization.
• To evaluate connectionist and symbolic models of language acquisition based on these findings.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of noun plural overregularization in the speech of 10 English-speaking children (aged 1;3 to 5;2).
• Utilized data from the CHILDES database.
• Calculated the rate of noun overregularization and compared it to past tense overregularization rates.

Main Results:

• Children exhibit a low rate of noun overregularization (mean = 8.5%), preferring correct irregular forms.
• Noun plural overregularization rates are comparable to past tense overregularization rates.
• Both noun plurals and past tenses show a U-shaped developmental curve, with correct irregulars appearing before overregularized forms.

Conclusions:

• Overregularization patterns in noun plurals and past tenses suggest similar underlying cognitive processes.
• Findings challenge purely connectionist models of language acquisition.
• Results align with models positing a default rule for regulars and lexical retrieval for irregulars, such as the blocking-and-retrieval-failure model.