Children's Acquisition of the English Past-Tense: Evidence for a Single-Route Account From Novel Verb Production Data.
This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, ) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, ) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal "add -ed" rule that does not require analogy across regular past-tense forms. Children (aged 3-4; 5-6; 6-7; 9-10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past-tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal "did yesterday." Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past-tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single-route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past-tense is best explained by a single-route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.
['Blything|Ryan P|RP|', 'Ambridge|Ben|B|', 'Lieven|Elena V M|EVM|']
D002648:Child D002675:Child, Preschool D003071:Cognition D005260:Female D006801:Humans D007360:Intelligence D007802:Language D007804:Language Development D008037:Linguistics D008297:Male D014706:Verbal Learning
Past-tense Analogy Cognitive development First language acquisition Inflectional morphology