The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language

Clahsen, H., Aveledo, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7736-1600 and Roca, I. (2002) The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language. Journal of Child Language, 29 (3). pp. 591-622. ISSN 0305-0009 doi: 10.1017/S0305000902005172

Abstract/Summary

We present morphological analyses of verb inflections produced by 15 Spanish-speaking children (age range: 1;7 to 4;7) taken from longitudinal and cross-sectional samples of spontaneous speech and narratives. Our main observation is the existence of a dissociation between regular and irregular processes in the distribution of errors: regular suffixes and unmarked (non-alternating) stems are over-extended to irregulars in children’s inflection errors, but not vice versa. We also found that overregularization errors at all ages are only a small minority of the children’s irregular verbs, that the period of overregularization is preceded by a stage without errors, and that the onset of overregularizations is connected to the emergence of obligatory finiteness markings. These findings are explained in terms of the dual-mechanism model of inflection.