MOSAIC+: A Crosslinguistic Model of Verb‐Marking Errors in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

AbstractThis study extended an existing crosslinguistic model of verb‐marking errors in children's early multiword speech (MOSAIC) by adding a novel mechanism that defaults to the most frequent form of the verb where this accounts for a high proportion of forms in the input. Our simulations showed that the resulting model not only provides a better explanation of the data on typically developing children but also captures the crosslinguistic pattern of verb‐marking error in children with developmental language disorder, including the tendency of English‐speaking children to show higher rates of optional‐infinitive errors and the tendency of Dutch‐, German‐, and Spanish‐speaking children to show higher rates of agreement errors. The new version of MOSAIC thus provides a unified crosslinguistic model of the pattern of verb‐marking errors in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder.