ERIC Number: EJ777157
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2002-Aug
Pages: 32
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
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Available Date: N/A
The Development of Regular and Irregular Verb Inflection in Spanish Child Language
Clahsen, Harald; Aveledo, Fraibet; Roca, Iggy
Journal of Child Language, v29 n3 p591-622 Aug 2002
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. [This research was supported by the German Science Foundation and the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation.]
Descriptors: Speech, Verbs, Child Language, Spanish Speaking, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Morphology (Languages), Longitudinal Studies, Case Studies, Error Patterns
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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