Morphological Strategies in

Language Acquisition

by

L.S.

and

J.S.

Paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for a graded credit for the course

“Psycholinguistics”

in Winter Term 2007/2008

Submission Date: 20/03/08

Approved by: Prof. Dr. J.H.

Philipps University Marburg

8 Appendix 2

Contents

1 Introduction..............................................................................................................3

2 Language Acquisition..............................................................................................4
2.1 The development from first sounds to first words..................................................4

3 Morphological Development...................................................................................6
3.1 The acquisition of morphemes...............................................................................7

3.1.1 Berko’s wug-experiment 7

3.1.2 Brown’s longitudinal study 8

4 Overgeneralization.................................................................................................11
4.1 Plural Overgeneralization....................................................................................12

4.2 Past Tense Overgeneralization............................................................................14

5 Strategies for past tense overgeneralization on irregular verbs .......................17

6 Conclusion..............................................................................................................25

7 References...............................................................................................................27

8 Appendix.................................................................................................................28
8 Appendix 3

1 Introduction

This term paper deals with morphological strategies in language acquisition

of children. In a first part, it will be shown that children pass through different stages
in the acquisition of their first language. A few examples will be given to clarify how
and at what age they produce their first sounds and then create their first words.

The main focus of this term paper lies on the child’s ability to apply
morphological rules that come along with the newly acquired words. It will be
discussed in how far children possess different morphological strategies in language
acquisition. Indeed, they are able to apply certain morphological techniques to
produce words and their morphological inflections. Furthermore, Berko’s WUG-
experiment will exemplify the child’s ability to productively use morphological
strategies in language acquisition. The longitudinal study by Roger Brown will be be
presented in order to prove that there is a certain order in the acquisition of
morphemes.

The final chapters will concentrate on the strategy of overgeneralization, a

morphological strategy used by children to inflect words, namely nouns, verbs and
adjectives. This strategy will be presented in detail in the following, as it clearly
illustrates the process in a child’s morphological development. Moreover, in a last
part, the acquisition of the plural and the past tense morpheme will be analyzed in
detail and supplemented by examples taken from the CHILDES database, which
provides detailed longitudinal studies on the development of child language. Here,
the focus will lie on strategies of overgeneralization of irregular verbs.
8 Appendix 4

2 Language Acquisition

This unit deals with the language acquisition of children. Indeed, children
manage to acquire a first language within a few years, without apparent effort and
without the need for formal instruction [LET: 123]. This part will address the
different stages of a child’s language acquisition. However, these different phases
will only be explained shortly, as general language acquisition is not the main topic
of this term paper.

2.1 The development from first sounds to first words

An infant’s speech production abilities are not apparent before the age of six months.
In fact, the production of speech sounds is limited, until the vocal apparatus
undergoes a change beginning at the age of four months which is not completed until
the age of six years (Guasti 2002:47). Nevertheless, children are by and large able to
hear every phonetic contrast used by human languages; besides, research in speech
perception has demonstrated that infants in their first months of life are able to
discriminate between similar sounds, such as /b/ and /p/ (King 2006:211).

Generally, infants of four to six weeks can only produce vowel-like sounds
(referred to as cooing), cries, and vegetative sounds. The phase of infant babbling
starts at around six to eight months. Infants then repeat syllables with no associated
meaning in terms of the so-called reduplicated babbling which results in syllables
such as gigi, panpan, bababa, gugugu, or dadadada. The other form of babbling is
referred to as non-reduplicated babbling, where different syllables are added
together, e.g. bamido (LET 2005:127). Indeed, children discover their capacity to
refer to objects and events in the world by an “autonomic, physiologically based
vocalization”, which is referred to as a protoword [INT1]. Children start to create
protowords when they are about one year old, e.g. a child might use an utterance like
ioioio for anything that can be rotated (LET 2005:138). These protowords do not
exist in adult language, instead, they are only used by children to name objects and
persons around them, e.g. the protoword wow-wow might refer to a dog.
8 Appendix 5

The first recognizable words at the age of about ten months mark the
beginning of what is known as the holophrastic stage when infants start to use
single-word utterances to communicate, although they do not yet use any
grammatical or morphological inflections. The word mama, for example, might be a
bid for a mother’s attention or a request for food directed towards the mother (King
2006:212). Like the protoword, these one-word utterances mainly consist of content
words which are grounded in everyday experiences, i.e. people, animals, food and
other objects expressed as bed, dog, mama, papa, spoon, milk. At the stage of two-
word utterances, most children are able to express semantic relations, i.e. an agent-
action as in Daddy run or Baby cry. Nevertheless, there still is limited use of
grammatical morphology, which can be illustrated in a child’s formation of the
possessive, where a child forms an utterance such as Miranda bed rather than using
the correct possessive form Miranda’s bed (King 2006:213).

The so-called stage of telegraphic speech starts at the age of 1;8-2;0 years,
when the child begins to create three- or multi-word combinations with hardly any
functional or inflectional elements, as in Milk all gone and Graham go out. The
following examples illustrate the development from one- to three-or multi-word
utterances:

(1) 1.3 years: More. [reaching for a cookie]

(2) 1.8 years: More read. [holding up book]

(3) 2.1 years: Andrew that off. [wanting to turn off the light]

(4) 2.8 years: He not taking the walls down.

(Clark
1977:295)

By the time the child starts to produce multi-word utterances, as in (4), the
development of morphological rules sets in. Elements such as function words (the
negation not) and inflectional morphemes (progressive –ing, plural –s) can be found
in the child’s utterances. This aspect of language acquisition will now be dealt with
in more detail.
8 Appendix 6

3 Morphological Development

Beginning with the topic of morphological development in language

acquistion, it has to be stated that the “two basic functions of morphological
operations are (i) the creation of new words (i.e. new lexemes), and (ii) spelling out
the appropriate form of a lexeme in a particular syntactic context” (Booij 2007: 13).
For the subject of first language acquisition the formation of new words plays a
rather marginal role. Therefore, the main focus in this paper will be on inflectional
morphology. Inflection is the morphological marking on a lexeme resulting in a set
of different grammatical words. The major inflections of the English language are:

with nouns:
Plural: boys = boy + s
Possessive: Mary’s = Mary + s
with verbs:
3rd person singular: works = work + s
past tense: worked = work + ed
progressive: working = work + ing
with adjectives:
comparative: bigger = big + er
superlative: biggest = big + est
(adapted from Clark, 1977: 23)

Children’s development in inflectional morphology commences at the age of

24-30 months, when they have reached the aforementioned multi-word stage. During
this period, the order of acquisition of function words and inflectional morphemes is
relatively constant among all children, where the present progressive usually appears
first, followed by prepositions, plurals, possessives, determiners, and the past tense
(LET 2005:127). As the grammatical development in the child’s first language
acquisition is of major importance for this term paper, the different morphological
strategies in language acquisition, the mastering of certain function words and
inflectional morphemes by children will be explained and complemented by
examples in the following part.
8 Appendix 7

3.1 The acquisition of morphemes

When children start forming utterances of several words, they realize that
their language is governed by rules (Aitchison 1989: 119). Therefore, they develop
their own ideas for grammatical rules and, as a result, do not always use grammatical
inflections correctly. At the age of about two years, they increasingly use
grammatical forms which reflect their developing grammatical rule systems. At this
stage, they start using function words and adding word endings to verbs and nouns,
and subsequently pass over to the acquisition of negative sentences and questions
(Clark 1977: 333). Some examples of the function words and inflections children add
to their utterances are prepositions like in, different articles, e.g. the, a, an, different
modals like can and will, the auxiliaries do, be and have, the plural /s/ as in cats and
finally the past tense form /t/ as in worked (Steinberg 2001: 11). However, they still
use incorrect and non-adult-like forms such as *broked or *foots (King 2006: 214).

3.1.1 Berko’s wug-experiment

One of the earliest studies on the child’s ability to productively use

morphological strategies was conducted by Jean Berko in 1958 (Berko 1958). It was
designed to prove that children do have knowledge of morphological rules. The
subjects were 80 children between the age of four and seven years. They were told
English words and nonsense words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) and guided towards
producing a certain grammatical form of these words, namely plural, past tense, third
person singular, possessive, comparative and superlative markings. By using
nonsense words, which were chosen in accordance with phonologically possible
English word formation, it was ensured that the children had never before heard any
inflected form of this word. For examples of tasks from the wug-experiment see
appendix (1).

All children understood what was requested from them and tried to give the
desired answers. The results were satisfactory: the children knew rules of inflectional
extension which they were able to apply to new words. On some items they did
8 Appendix 8

better than on others and the older children generally had better results than the
younger children.

The children were able to produce various English word forms of the possessive
and plural which required the use of the allomorphs /s/, /z/ and /z/ as well as past
verb forms which required the use of /d/, /t/ and /d/. In all three word forms their
handling was parallel. However, no child was able to productively use the less
common allomorphs /z/ and /d/ on nonsense words. This can be explained with
the low productiveness and rare occurrence of these forms in the language. With real
English words, the children generally had better performance results on the
allomorph /z/ to form possessives, than they had to form noun plurals. Moreover,
they did better on producing possessives and plurals of this form than on applying
the /d/ allomorph for past tense. The best performance could be observed with the
handling of the present progressive morpheme -ing. Since this form has only one
allomorph and is very common it is the easiest of all inflectional morphemes.

Further, the children were also given tasks where they were asked to compound,
to derive or to analyze compound words. The results for these items revealed that
children at that age are not yet able to productively use derivation but rather form
descriptive compounds. (Where many adults would say that the house a *wug lives
in is a *wuggery, the children would either say *wughouse or use real words, such as
birdcage.) Existing compound words are learnt as one lexical item and the children
rarely understand that they consist of two (or more) component parts.

All of the above findings do not only lead to the conclusion that children indeed
process morphological rules and apply them productively to new words, but also
indicate that there must be a general order of acquisition of different morphological
items. In the following study this aspect was investigated further.

3.1.2 Brown’s longitudinal study

Roger Brown, who studied the linguistic development of children, investigated

the language acquisition of three unacquainted children named Adam, Sarah and Eve
in a so-called longitudinal study. A longitudinal study is the modern approach to
8 Appendix 9

studying language acquisition data, which measure the linguistics progress of the
child at intermittent but predetermined times (LET 2005: 150). In his study, Brown
focused on the acquisition of different function words and inflections in English as a
first language. He examined at what age and in what order children mastered the use
of certain inflectional morphemes and function words. The results for Brown’s
children under investigation are listed below:

Table 1:

Adam Sarah Eve

age 2.6 age 2.10 age 1.9
present progressive plural present progressive
age 3.6 age 4.0 age 2.3
third person regular uncontractible copula
past regular past regular past irregular
uncontractible auxiliary uncontractible auxiliary articles
contractible copula contractible copula third person regular
contractible auxiliary third person irregular uncontractible auxiliary
contractible auxiliary contractible copula
(Table adapted from Brown: 1973: 271)

From this table, it can be inferred that the order of acquisition was similar
across the three children, with present progressive, plural, and past irregular verb
forms appearing first (King 2006: 216). Brown found that all of the three children
gradually learned to use the different morphological inflections. In fact, all children
whose first language is English seem to undergo the same developmental sequences
in morphological language acquisition. However, there are variations among the
children in terms of speed in which they learned the morphemes. He summed up his
results by ranking a set of 14 morphemes in their average order of acquisition:
8 Appendix 10

Table 2:
Average order Morpheme / Function Word Type Example
of Acquisition
1 Present progressive: -ing: continuing action Mary play-ing
2,3 Prepositions: location: in and on The mouse is in the box.
The book is on the table.
4 Plural: -s: number, one and more objects /s/, /z/, /z/
5 Past irregular: past time came, went, fell
6 Possessives: -’s: possession /s/, /z/, /z/, The girl-‘s
dog is big.
7 Uncontractible copula be: are, was Are they boys or girls?
Was that a dog?
8 Determiners / articles: definite, indefinite the, a
9 Past regular: past time, earlier in time: -ed He walk-ed the dog.
10 Third person regular: 3rd person present singular She run-s fast.
11 Third person irregular does, has
12 Uncontractible auxiliary be: is, were Is Mary happy?
13 Contractible copula be: -‘s, -‘re Mary-’s hungry.
They-’re running very
slowly.
14 Auxiliary be Contractible: tense carrier Mary-’s playing.
(Table adapted from LET 2005: 128, and Brown 1973: 274)

As we have also seen in the example of the wug-experiment, children usually

learn those morphemes that do not follow an exceptional rule more easily. Thus, they
start to learn the first suffix –ing, which can be added to verbs relatively simple.
Nevertheless, there are three different inflections that share the same phonetic
realizations and which are quite difficult to master for children.

This is the case in the regular plural marking and the genitive marking of
nouns and finally the third person singular marking. These endings are all realized in
/s/, which is added as a suffix at the end of a word.

Concluding from Brown’s longitudinal study, the regular plural from /s/ is
acquired fairly early before the acquisition of possessives and the third person
regular, which might be due to the fact that the plural form /s/ can be applied to
nouns relatively easy and is not as semantically complex as /s/, indicating belonging
or possession.
8 Appendix 11

4 Overgeneralization

The acquisition of morphology is accompanied by problems of morphological

alternation. One strategy children apply very often is referred to as
overgeneralization. As it has already been stated, children go through several stages
in the acquisition of inflections and function words. During this process, they
construct rules for the use of different grammatical morphemes, and often
overgeneralize these in their early phases of acquisition. (Clark 1977: 342 and LET
2005: 138).

These overgeneralizations result, for example, in incorrect word endings such

as adding the past tense –ed to irregular verbs or the plural –s to all nouns, which
leads to incorrect forms in the speech of young children, e.g. *goed and *fishes.
Therefore, overgeneralization implies the replacement of a correct form in adult
language with one that is incorrect.

The development of acquisition of rules for inflection can roughly be divided

into three (or more) phases (Booij 2007: 237). In a first phase the child will learn the
correctly inflected forms for some words by rote and thus use correct regular and
irregular forms such as the plural feet or the past tense form went. In a next step
however, the child will have internalized the rule for regular plural or past formation
and is very likely to produce forms such as *feets or *foots and *goed or *wented.
Only in the last phase, will the child have gradually acquired the rule and learned
which words are formed irregularly and will thus be able to apply the correct forms
for each word.

It has been found, that overgeneralization describes a normal and natural state
in the child’s development of language acquisition. Indeed, “Overgeneralization in
certain stages of language acquisition nicely reveals that discovering the regularities
is part and parcel of language acquisition” (Booij 2007: 237).

In the following, the children’s productive knowledge of English

morphology will be investigated on examples of plural and past tense
overgeneralization. Or rather, it will be explored how children’s knowledge about
morphological rules evolves.
8 Appendix 12

4.1 Plural Overgeneralization

An example taken from the CHILDES database, illustrates a case of plural

overgeneralization, where a child of 1.5 years uses an incorrect plural form of cars.
(For means of simplification, the extra analyses that the CHILDES database
provides, have been left out.)

@Location: Living room

@Activities: Free play
*BEN: brrmo.
%par: car noise
*BEN: carses.

[INT2: > English UK > Wells-zipped > benjamin02.cha]

Children use nouns in combination with different words at their first stages of
language acquisition, e.g. more or a numeral like two as in more cookie and two kitty
(Clark 1977: 338). At this stage they rarely use the adult version of plurals with the
suffix –s added to nouns. Indeed, the plural form in English has three different
phonological realizations (allomorphs), depending on the final consonant in the
word: /s/ (if the stem ends in a voiceless consonant) as in cats, /-z/ (if the stem ends
in a voiced consonant) as in dogs and /z/ (if the stem ends in /s/ /z/ or alveolar
fricatives) as in houses. Moreover, the rule for English plurals specifies that the
voiced segment requires the voiced /-z/, while voiceless segments require /-s/ which
is learned more easily than /z/ (Clark 1993: 105).

However, children normally learn and use the correct plural form, even of
irregular nouns, e.g. men or sheep, until they realize that there are different rules for
plural formation, when they learn the use of the regular plural inflectional suffix {-s}.
As a result, they often abandon the correct irregular words and use incorrect noun
plurals, such as *foots or even *feets.

This suggests, as already mentioned above, that the three main phases in the
development of a child’s acquisition of morphological rules also apply for the
8 Appendix 13

acquisition of plural formation. These different phases can be further subdivided as

shown in the following table:

Table 3:

Phas Noun 1 Noun 2 Noun3 Noun 4 Noun 5

e
1 boy cat man house foot, feet
2 men
3 boys cats mans house foots, feets
4 boyses catses, catsez mansez, menez housez footsez, feetsez
5 boys cats mans houses feets
6 boys cats men houses feet
(LET 2005:139)

This table nicely illustrates how children process the rules for plural
formation in English. During phases 1 and 2 the child is probably still forming two-
word utterances and considers those plural forms he uses as different lexical items. In
the example of noun 5, feet is treated as a different item and not seen as the plural
form of foot. In the next phase, the strategy of overregularization is first applied: The
inflectional morpheme –s is consequently used for plural marking, regardless of
whether or not the item’s plural is formed this way or not. At this stage their rule is
to add an s-sound to the noun. Thus, children often think that forms like noun 4:
house or rose already are a plural form and do not add a further morpheme to build
the plural. In phase 4, the child overregularizes the rule which applies to stems
ending in /s/, /z/ or alveolar fricatives and creates double marked plural forms, such
as *boyses or *footsez and *feetsez, which are still treated as different lexical items.
(This is also the case in the above example from the CHILDES database.)

Moreover, children also use different and sometimes incorrect allomorphs to

create the plural form of a noun, as in *housez when they should use the correct
voiceless /s/ plural ending as in houses. Only after children have passed these
different stages, they begin to use the correct plural forms, as represented in phase 6,
and they will have learned the rules for plural formations and the exceptions to them.
8 Appendix 14

4.2 Past Tense Overgeneralization

In English, the past tense form of verbs is generally formed by the addition of
the suffix –ed as in watch-ed. It has three different phonetic realizations: /d/ occurs
after voiced consonants other than /d/, /t/ occurs after voiceless consonants other than
/t/ and /d/ after verbs ending in /d/ or /t/.

However, there are irregular verb forms where the addition of the past tense
morpheme may involve a change in the verb stem as well as in the suffix, as in bring
which turns into brought (Clark 1977: 342). At the so-called three-word stage,
children start to use the correct irregular past tense forms, such as went, ran, etc.
Nevertheless, the children do not relate the past tense form went to the present tense
form go. Therefore, they often add the ending –ed, *goed, or *buyed and *breaked,
to irregular verbs in the past. Furthermore, children sometimes create a double
marking of a past form such as *wented and *broked. From this it can be inferred
that children create their own ideas when talking about past events, thereby applying
their own rule to regular verb forms as well as irregular verb forms. The following
rule exemplifies that children relate the –ed ending to something which happened in
the past (Clark 1977: 343):

Verb stem + “earlier in time” → Verb stem + -ed.

Just as other overgeneralization processes, the development of overgeneralization of

past tense forms has often been divided into several phases:

Stage 1: Little or no use of past tense forms

Stage 2: Sporadic use of some irregular forms (went,
broke)
Stage 3: Use of regular suffix {-ed} for all past tense
forms (jumped, goed, breaked)
Stage 4: Adultlike use of regular and irregular forms
(jumped, went)
(Clark 1977: 343)
8 Appendix 15

The following table gives an even more detailed impression, as it illustrates the
stages Clark has listed in more detail and lists steps in between:

Table 4:

Phas Noun1 Noun2 Noun3 Noun4 Noun5

e

1 walk play need come go

2 came went

3 walked played needed comed goed

4 walkeded playeded neededed comeded, cameded goed, wented

5 walked played needed comed goed

6 walked played needed came went

(LET 2005: 139)

The acquisition of the correct past formation is a relatively long process, which
usually begins after the acquisition of other inflectional morphemes such as plural,
progressive and possessive morphemes. This is due to a more difficult structure and
far more exceptions. In fact, a very large fraction of the verbs a child first uses form
their past irregularly, being part of the most common verbs in the English language.
(In effect, the irregular patterns could only persist over time because of their high
frequent use.) The formal complexity resulting from these irregularities presents a
challenge to the child, who will only gradually acquire the correct past tense forms of
the various irregular English verbs. The wug- experiment has shown that no child
was able to overgeneralize on supposedly irregular nonsense words. Where all adults
from the control group would form the past forms *bang and *glang for the nonsense
verbs *bing and *gling, children employed the regular past inflection –ed. It is not
surprising, that this pattern of irregular past formation is productive for adults but not
for children, since the children have not yet mastered the correct irregular forms
8 Appendix 16

belonging to this group. Only a few of the older children were able to supply the
correct past tense form rang. (Berko, 1958)
In order to give a deeper insight into how children tackle the challenge of correct
regular and irregular past formation, the next chapter will investigate selected
language samples from a longitudinal gathered set of data.
8 Appendix 17

5 Strategies for past tense overgeneralization

on irregular verbs

To further investigate the strategy of morphological overgeneralization in

language acquisition, this chapter will discuss data from one child of whom language
samples have been recorded over a certain period of time. It will be explored in how
far this child applies the strategies which have been described in major studies, as
presented above. In order to give an extensive impression of these strategies, we will
concentrate on one aspect: The focus will be on overgeneralization in the
development of irregular verb formation.

The language samples which served as a basis for this investigation are seven
different recordings of interviews held with the child Courtney over a time span of
nine months, during which the child was between 3;4 and 4;0 years old. (INT2: >
English UK > Belfast-zipped > court01.cha – court07.cha) The research was mainly
conducted with the CLAN Program. The main search options which have been
entered to retrieve the information were:

search for word patterns (in context):

kwal +t*CHI +s"*ed" @ court*.cha

kwal +t*CHI +s"[verb stem]*" @ court*.cha

search for verb frequencies (with verb count):

freq +t*CHI +t%mor -t* +s@"|+v" @ court*.cha

search for the MLUs :

mlu +t*CHI @ court*.cha

During the research process several instances have been encountered where
the search output did not match the actual data which could be found in the file. For
example, some verbs which could be found in the search for regularly formed past
endings (through the option kwal +t*CHI +s”*ed”) were not listed in the
morphological search for verbs (freq +t*CHI +t%mor -t* +s@"|+v"). Therefore
8 Appendix 18

the results presented in this paper may in some cases not exactly match the actual
data.

Before we will turn to have a close look at the development of Courtney’s

past tense formation rules, a few samples from the data will illustrate at what point in
language acquisition Courtney can be put down at age 3;4, where our recordings
start. A useful indication is the MLU rate. The mean length of utterances, which is
calculated dividing the number of morphemes by the number of utterances, has
proven to be quite telling about the child’s language proficiency in stages of early
language development (Berko/ Bernstein 1998: 368). At the time under investigation
the range of Courtney’s MLU lies between 3.9 and 5.9, the average MLU is 4.8.
Correspondingly, Courtney has already reached a stage where she is able to form
longer sentences with the basic syntactic rules.

For example, all regular plurals such as horses, babies or elephants are
employed correctly in the first recorded file:

File "court01.cha": line 992. Keyword: n|elephant

*CHI: oh # this is the big elephant xxx .

File "court01.cha": line 1077. Keywords: n|elephant-pl, n|door

*CHI: I go outside and see some elephants banging the door .

This indicates that she has internalized the rule about regular plural formation
in English. Conversely, at the one incident where she uses a noun which forms an
irregular plural she overregularizes the plural -s:

File "court01.cha": line 369. Keyword: n|sheep-pl

*CHI: and sheeps .

We will begin our investigations on past tense overgeneralization looking at

the accuracy of the use of correct irregular verb forms. For better results the primary
verbs do, have and be have been left out of the entire investigation. To start with, we
will analyze an early sample of Courtney’s language production.
8 Appendix 19

At her first interview, at age 3;4, Courtney uses four different full verbs in the
past tense. Of these four verbs, three form their past irregularly. These are tell, get
and hurt. The child produces each past form correctly, namely told, got, hurt and
banged for the regular verb. She does not yet overextend the rule of regular past
formation to all verbs, it seems that she has learnt the past forms for the verbs she
employs by rote and does not yet apply a general rule for past formation. Speaking in
terms of her rate of accuracy for irregular past tense formation, she would reach 100
percent.

At the second interview, one month later, Courtney employs a total of 16

different verbs in the past tense. Among these are 14 verbs which are usually formed
in an irregular pattern. Of these 14 verbs she forms 19 past forms, out of which she
uses 13 correctly and overgeneralizes 6. This calculates to an accuracy of 68.4%.

The accuracy rate already gives a rough indication that Courtney has, within
the last weeks, progressed in her development of past tense formation. In order to
make further statements about the stage of her language development, we will have a
closer look at the verb forms she employed in the interview:

*CHI: I slided [: slid] [*] # my Granpa Robs fell in the snow and hurt
his bum # <he was xx> [>] .
("court02.cha": line 2159)

Table 5: Courtney, age 3;5: Irregular verbs employed with past tense inflection:

# verb form Correct / Incorrect

employed
1 breaked x
2,3 broke (2) xx
4 built x
5 brought x
6 comed x
7 drinked x
8 et [: ate] x
9-10 fell (2) xx
8 Appendix 20

11 got x
12 hit x
13 hurt x
14 keeped x
15 put x
16-18 saw (3) xxx
19 slided x

13 correct forms
accuracy: 19 forms total = 68.4%

(adapted from INT2: > English UK > Belfast-zipped > court02.cha)

The data clearly shows that Courtney begins to add the –ed past form to both,
regular and irregular verbs. Courtney’s strategy is to add the –ed ending to the base
form of the verb, as in *comed, *drinked, *slided. In other cases she uses the correct
irregular form. It seems that the child uses, alongside with the regular past,
overgeneralized and irregular past forms at a fairly equal rate. There are 6 different
irregular verbs which are formed via overgeneralization and 7 which are formed
correctly. However, we have to take into consideration that 4 verbs which are formed
correctly (/t/ suffix, i.e. no phonological change from present to past) are build, hit,
hurt and put, verbs which already end on a t-sound, indicating past tense to the child.
This leaves us with three forms which do not follow the rule: verb stem + “earlier in
time” → verb stem + t-sound. These are broke, fell and saw.

The child uses the verb see 10 times in the present and three times in the
(correct) past. It is to assume that she has understood this exception to the rule, since
she easily alternates between the past and the present form and never (in all files)
overgeneralizes to forms such as *seed or *sawed. Additionally, at age 3;4 she said:
I haven’t seen that (“court01.cha”: line 488). The correct usage of the past and past
participle of see can probably be traced back to the high frequency of this word in the
child’s every day life.

The example of break indicates that Courtney begins to cast away the correct
irregular forms and replaces them with regularly built forms. Within the same
8 Appendix 21

sample, break is used in both forms, twice in its irregular past form and once with an
–ed ending. We will later have a closer view at the past tense use of this verb across
all of the files under investigation (see table 6, Verb 3). For another example of a
verb form where two past forms coexist see appendix (2). The excerpt has been
chosen because here, Courtney is extensively occupied with the use of one verb.

All of above observations lead to the conclusion that, at the time of this
interview, Courtney’s rule seems to be: verb stem + “earlier in time” → verb stem +
t-sound. She is already overgeneralizing the grammatical aspect of regular past tense
formation to most verbs, although she has some knowledge about the irregular forms.
However, it is very likely that she regards the remaining irregular past forms which
she applies correctly, namely saw and fell, and the corresponding present form as two
different lexical items. Courtney never fully abandons irregular forms. Even at the
point of a very high overregularization rate (see Table 7, age 3;9) she still applies
correct rules for past formation to 56,5% of the verb forms. This corresponds to the
findings from other studies, such as Kuczaj 1977, who found that the proportion of
overregularizations always stayed below 46% (Harley, 2001: 125).

Unfortunately, the data which has been recorded for Courtney covers only a
time span of nine months and does therefore not reflect the whole process of
acquisition of past tense inflection. Nevertheless, it offers several examples of
overgeneralization as it might be expected from children at that age and gives
evidence for a continuous development. Selected verbs reoccurring in several
interviews demonstrate this development:

Table 6: Occurrence of past forms of selected irregular verbs

*number behind the verb indicates the number of occurrences
fil Age Verb 1 Verb 2 Verb 3 Verb 4 Verb 5 Verb 6
e
01 3;4 come (1) hurt (1)
02 3;5 pp has fallen (1)* comed (1) breaked (1) et (1) hurt (1)
pp has fell (1) broke (2)
fell (2)
03 3;6
04 3;7 broke (1) ate (1) found (1)
05 3;9 falled (6) came (1) broked (1) ate (1) found (2) hurted (1)
fell (1)
8 Appendix 22

felled (2)
06 3;11 falled (1)
07 4;0 came (1) et (1) finded (2) hurt (1)
found (1)
(adapted from INT2: > English UK > Belfast-zipped > court01.cha-court07.cha)

Comparing the verb forms from the file which has been investigated above
(file 02) to later data collections, the most apparent difference lies between those
forms where she incorrectly attaches an –ed ending to the verb. At age 3;5 these are
*breaked,* comed, *drinked, *slided (see Table 5) and at age 3;9 these are
*broked,*falled, *felled,* likeded and *hurted. It seems as if Courtney has changed
her rule on past tense formation. She consequently no longer attaches the –ed ending
to the base form of the verb but to the irregular or even to the regular past form. This
offers different explanations. One solution would be to say that she only considers
the irregular past forms as separate lexical items. On account of the above examples,
though, we suggest that she has a fairly clear idea about these forms belonging to the
same verb as the present forms and being a variant which suggests “earlier in time”
but considers it necessary to add a further –ed marking to the verb, in regularity with
all other past forms.

In all case, it is quite evident that the child has progressed to a further stage
which implies more overregularized past forms and a larger variety of past tense
formation. The accuracy of correct past tense formation has continuously dropped
from the very first sample (age 3;4) to the fifth sample (age 3;9). At this stage she
seems to have reached the highest level of overgeneralization of the past morpheme
-ed. This goes in accordance with other studies, such as Brown, 1973. Although our
study does not cover a very long time span and the acquisition of past inflection is
not completed at the last recording, a “u-shaped” development can be observed for
the accuracy of irregular verbs in this data (Table 7; see also: Harley, 2001: 125).
Table 7 is designed to exhibit the development of Courtney’s performance over the
whole time span of the gathered data. It displays the accuracy of past forms
employed by Courtney at three selected stages, which has been calculated by
dividing the number of correct past forms by the total number of past forms among
(i) irregular and (ii) both, regular and irregular, verbs.
8 Appendix 23

Table 7:

Accuracy of verb forms

100,00%
90,50%
80,00% 83%
71,40%
68,40% verb forms past
Percentage

60,00% 56,50% irregular

50%
40,00% verb forms past (all)

20,00%

0,00%
3;5 3;9 4;0
Age

(adapted from INT2: > English UK > Belfast-zipped > court01.cha-court07.cha)

Table 8:

Accuracy of verbs

100,00%
90,50%
73,30% 88%
80,00%
62,50% 75%
Percentage

60,00% verbs past irregular

57,10%
40,00% verbs past (all)

20,00%

0,00%
3;5 3;9 4;0
Age

(adapted from INT2: > English UK > Belfast-zipped > court01.cha-court07.cha)

Table 7 shows that the child’s usage of incorrect (overgeneralized) verb forms
increases before it decreases again. In contrast, table 8 suggests that the number of
different verbs which are formed correctly increases steadily. (At age 3;9, Courtney
employs 10 incorrect past forms but 6 of these are for the verb fall. Earlier, at age
3;5, she only used 6 incorrect past forms but on 6 different verbs (compare also table
8 Appendix 24

5).) This raises the question if these results give an indication towards a different
interpretation of Courtney’s development on past tense formation. However, these
results do not have to be contradictory to table 7. It might only indicate that Courtney
has maybe already stored some irregular forms under the same lexical item as the
verb stem. Thus, the number of individual irregular verbs that is formed correctly has
increased. Yet, the variations between and coexistences of overgeneralized and
correct past forms of other verbs has increased as well resulting in a temporarily
poorer overall performance – if all verb forms and not only the performance on
separate items are taken into account (table 7).

Concluding from the investigations on Courtney’s language samples, it can be

said that the child employs the strategies of overgeneralization in accordance with
the results from other studies on this subject. It can be inferred that she starts off with
a rather good performance on past tense verb forms, at a stage where she has not yet
developed any rules for past tense formation. In a next phase, this good performance
continuously drops down to poor performance, at a stage where she has acquired the
regular past tense ending –ed and increasingly overgeneralizes it to irregular verbs.
Finally, although she has not yet fully mastered all irregular verbs, many irregular
forms are no longer overgeneralized but have been understood as exceptions to the
rule.

Additionally, the findings of this chapter suggest that after a phase of

overregularization which is applied not only to the present stem of irregular verbs but
also to the past form of both, regular and irregular verbs, children gradually begin to
except that some verbs form their past along different patterns. They finally begin to
associate and list the irregular past forms as belonging to the same lexical item as the
base form. However, this is not a sudden development. Children usually do not have
acquired all irregular past forms until their first school years. Only then will they
eventually be able to, hypothetically (see p. 15), overextend irregular past formation
patterns productively on unknown verbs. Based on our interpretations, Courtney
might during the course of the recordings have progressed through the stages 3-5 of
table 4 (p. 15) in her language development.
8 Appendix 25

6 Conclusion

Language is central to our lives. The first cry of a new born baby signals its
successful arrival in the world. From the day we are born, we are able to
communicate our needs. In order to refine our utterances, however, we have to learn
to speak in the language that surrounds us. Over a period of less than a year the baby
will be able to utter words and soon utterances which eventually take the form of
complete sentences. However, it is essential for children to be exposed to a language
in order to learn it. The constant contact with language enables them to daily learn
new words and structures at a tremendous rate.

It has been of central interest for this paper that children do not only copy
words and phrases which they pick up but that they develop rules, eventually
enabling them to form grammatically correct and structurally complex sentences.
Additionally, this paper has illustrated that children follow a certain order in their
acquisition of these grammatical aspects. It takes several years for children to learn
the rules of a language and refine their overgeneralized rules.

Overgeneralization is a strategy which is employed by all children. It is

employed with different syntactic and morphological structures and seems to be
essential in the course of language development and rule formation. That children
indeed possess morphological rules which they can productively use on new words,
has been shown in the wug-experiment where children applied their rules to
nonsense material. The child first acquires the most simple grammatical rules and
gradually develops the more complex. In the course of this development, children
pass from a stage of rather good performance to poor performance at a stage of high
overgeneralization of this aspect. When they have internalized the rule plus
exceptions they pass over to good performance again. The investigation of
CHILDES database material has underlined these findings. In addition, new
questions have come up. Due to slight irregularities by the CLAN program and the
limited quantity of material we cannot formulate new rules on the development of
irregular past tense formation. However, the child under investigation clearly uses
8 Appendix 26

overgeneralization as a strategy of language acquisition and has applied this strategy

on numerous verbs and in different degrees at certain stages of the time span covered
by the analysis.
8 Appendix 27

7 References

Aitchison, Jean. 1989. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics.

London: Routledge.

Berko, Jean. 1958. ”The Child’s Learning of English Morphology”. In: Word, 14: 150- 177.

Berko Gleason, Jean/ Bernstein Ratner, Nan (eds.). 1998. Psycholinguistics. Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace College Publ.

Bloom, Paul. 2001. How Children Learn the Meaning of Words. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.

Booij, Geert. 2007. Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Roger. 1973. A First Language. The Early Stages. London: George Allen & Unwin
Ltd.

Clark, Eve. 1993. The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, Herbert / Clark, Eve V. 1977. Psychology and Language. An Introduction to

Psycholinguistics. New York et al: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Fletcher, Paul. 1985. A Child’s Learning of English. Oxford: Blackwell.

Guasti, Maria Teresia. 2002. Language Acquisition and the Growth of Grammar. London
et.al.: The MIT Press.

Harley, Trevor. 2001. The Psychology of Language. From Data to Theory. Hove:
Psychology Press.

King, Kendall A. 2006. “Child language acquisition.” In Fasold, R. W., Connor-Linton, J.

(eds.). An Introduction to Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 205-234.

Linguistic Engineering Team (LET). 2005. Psycholinguistics. Marburg: The Virtual

Linguistics Campus.

Mac Whinney, Brian. 1991. The CHILDES project. Hillsdale et al: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.

Steinberg, Danny D. / Nagata, H. / Aline, D. P. 2001. Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind

and World. Second Edition. London: Longman.

Internet Sources

[INT1]: http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780195177879, accessed 4 March 2008.

[INT 2]: CHILDES DATABASE. http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/data/, accessed 4 March 2008.

8 Appendix 28

8 Appendix

(1) Wug-Experiment, Berko 1958: Examples (INT2):

Plural Singular and Plural Possessive

Plural Past Tense

8 Appendix 29

(2)

Situation: The Child is playing a fishing game with the investigator:

*INV: you see if you can catch a fish . *CHI: it doesn't want caught .
*INV: oh it fell off ! […]
*INV: O [=! laughs] . *CHI: xxx doesn't want caught .
*MOT: no you've to do it with the rod *INV: he doesn't want caught does he ?
Courtney . *CHI: he won't caught # he doesn't want
[…] caught !
*CHI: <I caught a yellow one> [>] . […]
[…] *CHI: that fish doesn't want # caught .
*CHI: one two three four five once I caught *INV: oh # it doesn't .
a fish alive # six seven eight nine ten # when I *INV: it's trying to swim away !
let it go again # why did you let it go # cause
it bit my finger xxx # which finger did it bite # *CHI: it's trying to fall in .
this little finger on the right [sings] . *CHI: Mum that fish doesn't want caught !
[…] *MOT: does it not ?
*CHI: I got one ! […]
*CHI: have to catch a red one . *CHI: fish do you want caught ?
*CHI: xxx red one . […]
*INV: ah well done # that's good # ah very *CHI: xxx I caught one .
good ! […]
*CHI: look what I catched Mummy ! *CHI: I &w that one doesn't want caught .
*MOT: uhhuh very good . […]
[…] *CHI: <I can't catch it # can't catch it>[<] !
*CHI: Dad I catched a yellow one ! *CHI: <yeah # I caught it>[<] !
*FAT: very good . […]
[…] *CHI: xxx caught .
*CHI: I catched two ! […]
[…] *CHI: caught it # xxx catch it .
*CHI: I think he doesn't want caught . […]
*INV: I think he doesn't # no . *CHI: xxx caught .
*CHI: do you want caught or what ? […]
*INV: O [=! laughs] . *CHI: I caught them !
*CHI: doesn't . […]
[…] *CHI: <I catched it>[<] !
8 Appendix 30

(INT2: > English UK > Belfast-zipped > court02.cha": lines 1883-2795.)