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Infinitives or bare stems? Are English-speaking children defaulting to the highest-frequency form?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2013

SANNA H. M. RÄSÄNEN ,
BEN AMBRIDGE  and
JULIAN M. PINE
SANNA H. M. RÄSÄNEN*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
BEN AMBRIDGE
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
JULIAN M. PINE
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
*
Address for correspondence: Sanna Räsänen, Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Bedford Street South, Liverpool, United Kingdom. tel: +441517941109; e-mail: S.H.M.Rasanen@liverpool.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Young English-speaking children often produce utterances with missing 3sg -s (e.g., *He play). Since the mid 1990s, such errors have tended to be treated as Optional Infinitive (OI) errors, in which the verb is a non-finite form (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate & Yang, 2007). The present article reports the results of a cross-sectional elicited-production study with 22 children (aged 3;1–4;1), which investigated the possibility that at least some apparent OI errors reflect a process of defaulting to the form with the highest frequency in the input. Across 48 verbs, a significant negative correlation was observed between the proportion of ‘bare’ vs. 3sg -s forms in a representative input corpus and the rate of 3sg -s production. This finding suggests that, in addition to other learning mechanisms that yield such errors cross-linguistically, at least some of the OI errors produced by English-speaking children reflect a process of defaulting to a high-frequency/phonologically simple form.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , July 2014 , pp. 756 - 779
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

The authors would like to thank Hopscotch, Bizzkidz, and Oakdale Children's Day Nurseries in Liverpool for their participation. This research was funded by an ESRC PhD Scholarship awarded to the first author.

References

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