“Who Breaked the Rule?”: Rethinking English Past Tense Overregularizations

Abstract

To learn a language, children must go beyond simply imitating speech and learn the rules of the language from their surrounding linguistic environment. One way to tell that children learn rules is that they apply rules to an overly broad set of words. For example, English-learning children produce forms like ‘breaked’ or ‘catched’ at around 3 years of age. These forms, called past tense overregularizations, show that children have implicitly discovered the past tense formation rule: namely, “add ‘–ed’ to a verb to create the past tense.” But does it take children until age 3 to discover such rules? This dissertation combines a behavioral study with 16-month-olds and a corpus analysis of longitudinal, spontaneous child speech to achieve two goals: the first is to seek evidence that the past tense rule can be found in 16-month-olds, which would be consistent with many observations that children display significant receptive abilities long before their productive abilities reach the same level. The second goal is to determine if the production of past tense overregularizations can be explained by factors other than the discovery of a grammatical rule. Results indicate that children have enough experience with English by 16 months of age to represent verb + ‘–ed’ months before they begin to overregularize in production; therefore, production does not seem to reflect when the past tense rule actually comes online. 16-month-olds were able to discriminate between overregularized verbs and 1) their correct counterparts, 2) nonce verbs + ‘–ed’, and 3) English noun stems marked with ‘–ed’. Further, overregularizations in production seem to reflect children's need to simplify their utterances as they attempt to say more and more complex sentences.