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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2002

HARALD CLAHSEN ,
FRAIBET AVELEDO  and
IGGY ROCA
HARALD CLAHSEN
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex
FRAIBET AVELEDO
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex
IGGY ROCA
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Essex
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , August 2002 , pp. 591 - 622
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research in this paper has been supported by a German Science Foundation grant to Harald Clahsen (grant No.: SFB282/C7) and a grant of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation, Venezuela to Fraibet Aveledo. We are grateful to Conxita Lleó, Gary Marcus, Jürgen Meisel, Silvina Montrul, Andrew Radford, Tessa Say, Helga Weyerts, and two anonymous JCL reviewers for comments and helpful suggestions.