Y luego un tiburón blanco ha abrido la boca: Spanish children’s overregularization of irregular past participles

Abstract

Abstract The current study investigates the influence of Age, Lexical frequency, and Language background on children’s overregularization of irregular past participles (e.g., ponido ‘put’, cf. puesto). A total of 536 past participles used in compound tenses (e.g., he escrito ‘I have written’) were extracted from child speech in online corpora from both monolingual Spanish (N = 45) and Spanish-English bilingual children (N = 2) between the ages of 3;0 and 6;11. The children overregularized 7 % of their past participles and did so more often with low-frequency participles like escrito ‘written’ than with high-frequency ones like hecho ‘done/made’. Additionally, Spanish-English bilinguals overregularized more than the monolinguals, and the bilinguals’ overregularizations persisted with age while the monolingual children’s rates decreased with age. These results demonstrate that both monolingual and bilingual children overregularize irregular past participles in the structures of interest and that their overregularizations are mediated by lexical frequency. Further, these results suggest that children must be exposed to enough examples of irregular forms before they stop applying the regular pattern. While the monolingual children who were exposed to extended amounts of Spanish retreated from participle overregularization with age, bilinguals’ rates of overregularization persisted through the ages studied. These findings indicate that children from both speaker groups follow a similar acquisitional path of irregular past participles; however, language experience predicts their rates of overregularization, and the timespan required to master the irregulars.