Abstract
AbstractChildren's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task, investigated the acquisition of the irregular distribution in the Turkish causative. Results showed that in early acquisition, to pin down the four causative suffixes, children engaged in comparisons between analogous exemplars. Thereafter to tackle the irregularity in two of the suffixes, children entertained competing hypotheses that yielded overregularizations and irregularizations. Overregularizations were instances of abstraction across the input based on type frequency; irregularizations were attempts to default to erroneous micro-generalizations. Negative correlation between errors and verb frequency suggested that recovery from errors was sensitive to token frequency. The overgeneralize-then-recover pattern that emerged in the acquisition of causative supported an integrated account of the roles of analogy, abstraction, and frequency in morphology learning.
Highlights
Languages contain countless regularities as well as irregularities
Here we focus on the irregularity in the causative and children’s regularization behavior in learning the construction to examine whether a rule-based or an analogy-based model of morphological acquisition better accounts for the pattern in children’s acquisition and use of the Turkish causative
Our findings yielded no evidence for an error-free acquisition path for the Turkish causative
Summary
Given that a regular system is in principle a system with less variation, the fewer the irregularities, the easier it would be to learn a language. When one adopts such a position, irregularities are like unwanted weeds in the garden. Children’s erroneous uses in the form of overgeneralizations and irregularizations provide a way to investigate how the child’s mind operates in discovering the patterns in her native language. IP address: 3.92.176.94, on 16 Feb 2022 at 09:59:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
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