*BREAKED VERSUS BROKE: 16-MONTH-OLDS COMPREHEND OVERGENERALIZED VERBS OVER THEIR IRREGULAR CORRECT COUNTERPART

Abstract

Overgeneralizations are heard in child speech around age 3-to 4-years-old. This led researchers to believe that this is when grammatical categories (e.g.verb) are formed in their lexicon to which they add grammatical morphemes like the past tense -ed. However, this school of thought has changed with recent research on 16-month-olds. It seems that these toddlers can anticipate that -ed can be added to irregular verbs like break thus pushing back the age at which they form grammatical categories (Figueroa & Gerken, 2019). But do these 16-month-olds have any knowledge of what words such as breaked mean? And do they comprehend these overgeneralized forms better than the correct irregular form (e.g. broke)? Ten 16-month-olds heard sentences like Georgie breaked/broke the doorwhile looking at pairs of pictures, one of which corresponded with the action of the sentence. Although the results are weak with a small sample population, children had significantly longer looking times to the correct picture for overregularized verbs than correct irregular verbs. These results are consistent with the past finding that 16-month-olds anticipate overregularized forms like breaked long before they produce them and further suggests that children also comprehend these forms.