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Weird past tense forms

F Xu1, S Pinker

  • 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Journal of Child Language
|October 1, 1995
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Children rarely overapply irregular past tense rules, contrary to common assumptions. Analysis of child language data shows these errors are infrequent and lack consistent patterns, suggesting children effectively learn irregular verb forms.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Commonly assumed children overgeneralize irregular past tense verb forms.
  • Previous theories proposed rule-based or connectionist explanations for these errors.
  • Empirical data on the frequency and nature of these errors in child language acquisition is lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the actual rate, time course, and nature of irregular past tense overapplication errors in children.
  • To test predictions from rule-based and connectionist theories of language acquisition.
  • To provide empirical evidence on children's acquisition of irregular past tense morphology.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of 20,000 past tense and participle usages from nine children in the CHILDES database.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Systematic search for specific error types: irregular vowel-change overapplication, blends, productive -en suffixation, gross distortions, and double-suffixation.
  • Quantitative analysis of error frequency, patterns, and consistency across verbs and ages.

    • Main Results:

    • Irregular past tense overapplication errors were rare, occurring in approximately 0.2% of opportunities.
    • Errors showed few stable patterns, lacking consistency across verbs or age groups.
    • Most errors were closely based on existing irregular verbs; gross distortions were absent.
    • No clear age trend was observed in the occurrence of these errors.

    Conclusions:

    • Both rule-based and connectionist theories may overestimate the prevalence of irregular past tense overapplication errors.
    • Children appear to master irregular verb forms with high accuracy.
    • Accurate learning of irregular forms may stem from their status as arbitrary sound-meaning pairings (words) and children's word-learning abilities.