Children's Acquisition of the English Past-Tense: Evidence for a Single-Route Account From Novel Verb Production Data

Blything, Ryan P, Ambridge, Ben ORCID: 0000-0003-2389-8477 and Lieven, Elena VM (2018) Children's Acquisition of the English Past-Tense: Evidence for a Single-Route Account From Novel Verb Production Data. Cognitive Science, 42 (S2). pp. 621-639.

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Abstract

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past‐tense as its test case. The single‐route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past‐tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual‐route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add ‐ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past‐tense forms. Children (aged 3–4; 5–6; 6–7; 9–10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past‐tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past‐tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single‐route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past‐tense is best explained by a single‐route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Cognitive development, Inflectional morphology, Past-tense, First language acquisition, Analogy
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	26 Jan 2018 11:50
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 06:42
DOI:	10.1111/cogs.12581
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3016915