Abstract
This study tested the claim of input-based accounts of language acquisition that children's inflectional errors reflect competition between different forms of the same verb in memory. In order to distinguish this claim from the claim that inflectional errors reflect the use of a morphosyntactic default, we focused on the Japanese verb system, which shows substantial by-verb variation in the frequency distribution of past and nonpast forms. 22 children aged 3;2-5;8 (Study 1) and 26 children aged 2;7-4;11 (Study 2) completed elicited production studies designed to elicit past and nonpast forms of 20 verbs (past-biased and nonpast-biased). Children made errors in both directions, using past forms in nonpast contexts, and vice versa, with the likelihood of each determined by the frequency bias of the two forms in the input language, even after controlling for telicity. This bi-directional pattern provides particularly direct evidence for the role of frequency-sensitive competition between stored forms.
Highlights
A key prediction of input-based accounts of morphological development is that the pattern of errors in young children’s speech will reflect the frequency distribution of different forms in the input
Nor were bi-directional errors restricted to a small subgroup of children, with 14/22 making at least one error of each type. These data count against the idea that verb-marking errors in Japanese reflect the use of a single morphosyntactic default form
The results of Study 2 provide further support for the prediction that Japanese children will show a bi-directional pattern of verb-marking error, which is conditioned by the frequency bias of past and nonpast tense forms in the input language
Summary
A key prediction of input-based accounts of morphological development is that the pattern of errors in young children’s speech will reflect the frequency distribution of different forms in the input. Children’s verb inflection errors tend to involve the use of a higher-frequency form of the verb when a lower-frequency form is required. The results of these studies are not definitive because of the distributional properties of the languages that have been studied far. Languages such as English or Spanish, with a uniform error pattern in which forms of a particular category are used instead of forms of some other categories across verbs
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