Premium
Children's Productivity in the English Past Tense: The Role of Frequency, Phonology, and Neighborhood Structure
Author(s) -
Marchman Virginia A.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1207/s15516709cog2103_2
Subject(s) - phonology , productivity , past tense , psychology , constraint (computer aided design) , vowel , connectionism , linguistics , production (economics) , mechanism (biology) , mathematics , cognition , economics , philosophy , macroeconomics , verb , geometry , epistemology , neuroscience
The productive use of English past tense morphology in school‐aged children (N = 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using an elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero‐marking, e.g., sit → sit; vowel‐change, e.g., ride → rid). Overall frequency of errors decreased with age, yet the tendency for certain types of irregularizations increased in the older groups. Analyses across items indicated that all error types were predicted by combinations of item frequency, phonological characteristics of stems and past tense forms, and aspects of phonological past tense “neighborhoods”. Contrary to “hybrid” or dual‐mechanism models incorporating a phonologically‐insensitive default mechanism (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), these results suggest that children's productivity with regular and irregular patterns is consistent with a phonologically‐based constraint satisfaction system similar to that implemented in connectionist models (Daugherty & Seidenberg, 1992; Plunkett & Marchman, 1991, 1993).