This paper brings a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations (foots, mans) to bear on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children (aged 1;3 to 5;2) from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985, 1990) were analysed. The rate of noun overregularization is low, mean = 8.5%, demonstrating that children prefer correct to overregularized forms. Rates of noun overregularization are not significantly different from their rates of past tense overregularization, and noun plurals, like verb past tenses, follow a U-shaped developmental curve in which correct irregulars precede the first overregularized forms. These facts suggest that plural and past tense overregularizations are caused by similar underlying processes. The results pose challenges to connectionist models, but are consistent with Marcus et al.'s (1992) blocking-and-retrieval-failure model in which regulars are generated by a default rule while irregulars are retrieved from the lexicon.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900009879 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Language deficits in pre-symptomatic Huntington's disease: evidence from Hungarian.
Brain Lang
June 2012
Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary.
A limited number of studies have investigated language in Huntington's disease (HD). These have generally reported abnormalities in rule-governed (grammatical) aspects of language, in both syntax and morphology. Several studies of verbal inflectional morphology in English and French have reported evidence of over-active rule processing, such as over-suffixation errors (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow children process over-regularizations: evidence from event-related brain potentials.
J Child Lang
August 2007
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, United Kingdom.
This study examines the mental processes involved in children's on-line recognition of inflected word forms using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixty children in three age groups (20 six- to seven-year-olds, 20 eight- to nine-year-olds, 20 eleven- to twelve-year-olds) and 23 adults (tested in a previous study) listened to sentences containing correct or incorrect German noun plural forms. In the two older child groups, as well as in the adult group, over-regularized plural forms elicited brain responses that are characteristic of combinatorial (grammatical) violations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA dense corpus study of past tense and plural overregularization in English.
J Speech Lang Hear Res
December 2004
Max Planck Child Study Centre, Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
In the "blocking-and-retrieval-failure" account of overregularization (OR; G. F. Marcus, 1995; G.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOverregularization in English plural and past tense inflectional morphology: a response to Marcus (1995).
J Child Lang
October 1997
University of Texas at Dallas, School of Human Development, Richardson 75083-0688, USA.
In a recent note, Marcus (1995) suggests that the rate of overregularization of English irregular plural nouns is not substantively different from that of English irregular past tense verbs. This finding is claimed to be in conflict with the predictions of connectionist models (Plunkett & Marchman, 1991, 1993) which are said to depend solely on the dominance of regular over irregular forms in determining overregulation errors. However, these conclusions may be premature given that Marcus averaged overregulation rates across irregular nominal forms that varied in token frequency and across samples representing a broad range of children's ages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren's overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis.
J Child Lang
June 1995
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 01003, USA.
This paper brings a quantitative study of children's noun plural overregularizations (foots, mans) to bear on recent comparisons of connectionist and symbolic models of language. The speech of 10 English-speaking children (aged 1;3 to 5;2) from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985, 1990) were analysed. The rate of noun overregularization is low, mean = 8.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!