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, ) 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, ) 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.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 621-639 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Cognitive Science |
Volume | 42 |
Issue number | 52 |
Early online date | 12 Jan 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 31 May 2018 |
Research Groups and Themes
- Cognitive Science
- Developmental (Psychological Science)
Keywords
- Analogy
- Cognitive development
- First language acquisition
- Inflectional morphology
- Past-tense