Overregularization
Abstract
Children's overregularization errors such as comed bear on three issues: U-shaped development where children get worse over time because of an interaction between memory and rule governed processes; the unlearning of grammatical errors in the absence of parental negative feedback; and whether cognitive processes are computed by rules or by parallel distributed processing networks. We remedy the lack of quantitative data on overregularization by exhaustively analyzing the 11,500 irregular past tense utterances in the transcribed spontaneous speech of 69 children, and by reviewing the naturalistic and experimental literature. We found: (1) overregularization errors are relatively rare, suggesting that there is no qualitative defect in children's grammars that must be unlearned. (2) Overregularization occurs at a roughly constant low rate from the late two's into the school age years, affecting most irregular verbs. (3) Though there is no stage where overregularization errors predominate, one other aspect of U-shaped development was confirmed: an extended period of correct performance before the first overregularization. (4) No support was found for the hypothesis that overregularization is caused by increases in the number or proportion of regular verbs in the input to the past tense system. (5) The onset of overregularization is best predicted by the onset of obligatoriness. (6) The more often a parent uses an irregular past tense form of a verb, the less often the child overregulates it. And (7) verbs are protected from overregularization by neighborhoods of similar sounding irregulars.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 1990
- Accession Number
- ADA356731
Entities
People
- Gary F. Marcus
- Michael Ullman
- Michelle Hollander
- Steven Pinker
- T. John Rosen
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology