Overgeneralizations of number inflections in the learning of written French: The case of noun and verb

Abstract

The present article reports a study of overgeneralizations occurring in the learning of written French morphology in which the markers of plurality for nouns (‐s) and verbs (‐nt) are mostly not audible. Because of this inaudibility, many nouns and verbs that are pronounced alike are spelled differently. French writers are thus confronted with interference in such cases: two (‐s vs. ‐nt) graphemic configurations are possible for the same phonological configuration, which sometimes leads to errors in adults. The experiment shows that, at a certain point during their learning of written morphology, children make the same type of error: they (over) generalize the number marker for nouns (‐s) to verbs and the number marker for verbs (‐nt) to nouns, before achieving complete mastery of plural morphology. Moreover, children would store and use instances of associations between stems and morphemes when an item can, depending on the context, be either a noun or a verb. In this case, the occurrence frequencies of instances would determine the probability and the intensity of plural morpheme activation, leading to the appearance of homophone effects which have already been described in adults: nouns frequently encountered as verbs are often inflected with (‐nt), whereas only verbs frequently used as nouns are inflected with (‐s). These results are discussed within the framework of an activation model involving both rules and associations