The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language.
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 over-regularizations is connected to the emergence of obligatory finiteness markings. These findings are explained in terms of the dual-mechanism model of inflection.
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK.
Harald
H
Clahsen
Fraibet
F
Aveledo
Iggy
I
Roca
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014706:Verbal Learning