The English Past Tense and the Child's Conception of Time

Abstract

During acquisition of the English past tense, children are observed to ‘overregularize’ many irregular verbs—for example, saying failed instead of fell. These speech errors are commonly assumed to be the product of an underlying mechanism which maps the stem of a verb to its past tense form. The meanings of these verbs, it is assumed, play no role in this process. However, some research suggests that past tense acquisition is not independent of conceptual development—the meanings encoded by the past tense change along with the child’s conception of temporality. Bloom, Lifter, and Hafitz (1980) found that the initial distribution of past tense morphology in children’s speech was sensitive to the lexical aspect of verbs. Children were more likely to use the past tense with telic verbs—that is, verbs denoting bounded events, such as break or fall—than with activity verbs, which denote unbounded, imperfective events such as draw or play. They demonstrated that past tense morphology initially refers to the result of change-of-state events (such as break or fall) rather than to pastness per se. In this study, we extend these ideas by investigating whether lexical aspect accounts for differences in the overregularization rate among verbs.