Children's over-regularization of nouns and verbs

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe procedure used by Pratt, Tunmer & Bowey (1984) was employed in this study to investigate young children's abilities to correct over-regularized plural nouns and verbs in the past tense. Older children (mean age 6; 4) performed better than younger children (mean age 4; 11) and plural nouns were corrected significantly more than past-tense verb forms. As predicted, the younger children were better at correcting the nouns than the verbs; the two grammatical forms were corrected equally well by the older children.