Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-7nlkj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-26T17:48:29.724Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Vowel dominance in overregularizations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Joseph Paul Stemberger
Joseph Paul Stemberger*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Communication Disorders, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Email: stemberg@staff.tc.umn.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When children produce regularizations like comed, not all verbs are equally likely to be regularized. Several variables (e.g. lexical frequency) have been shown to be relevant, but not all the variability between verbs is understood. It is argued here that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form. Using a notion of recessive vs. dominant vowel (where recessive vowels are more likely to be replaced by dominant vowels than vice versa) based on adult phonological processing, it is predicted that regularizations should be likely when the base vowel is dominant and unlikely when the past tense vowel is dominant. Data from 17 children reported in the literature, aged 1;6–5;6, show that this prediction is correct. Implications for the role of phonological variables in the processing of irregular past tense forms are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , October 1993 , pp. 503 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported in part by NSF Research Grant No. BNS-8820757.

References

REFERENCES

Brown, R. (1973). A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. L. & Slobin, D. I. (1982). Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense. Language 58, 265–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. Psychological Review 93, 283–321.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
French, N. R., Carter, C. W. & Koenig, W. Jr. (1930). The words and sounds of telephone conversations. Bell System Technical Journal 9, 290–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fromkin, V. A. (1971). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Language 47, 27–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halle, M. & Mohanan, K. P. (1985). Segmental phonology of Modern English. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 57–116.Google Scholar
Ingram, D. (1989). Underspecification theory and phonological acquisition. Unpublished manuscript, University of British Columbia.Google Scholar
Kuczaj, S. A. (1976). -ing, -s, & -ed: a study of the acquisition of certain verb inflections. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Kuczaj, S. A. (1977). The acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 16, 589–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levitt, A. G. & Healy, A. F. (1985). The roles of phoneme frequency, similarity, and availability in the experimental elicitation of speech errors. Journal of Memory & Language 24, 717–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKay, D. (1979). Lexical insertion, inflection, and derivation: creative processes in word production. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 8, 477–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKay, D. (1987). The organization of perception and action: a theory for language and other cognitive skills. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J. & Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57, (4).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Motley, M. T. & Baars, B. J. (1975). Encoding sensitivities to phonological markedness and transition probability: evidence from spoonerisms. Human Communication Research 2, 351–61.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. & Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28, 73–194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rumelhart, D. & McClelland, J. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In Rumelhart, D. & McClelland, J. (eds), Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Bransford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1982, 1985). The lexicon in a model of language production. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California at San Diego.) New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1985). An interactive activation model of language production. In Ellis, A. (ed.), Progress in the psychology of language, Vol. 1. London: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1989). Speech errors in early child language production. Journal of Memory & Language 28, 164–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1990). Wordshape errors in language production. Cognition 35, 123–57.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stemberger, J. P. (1991 a). Apparent anti-frequency effects in language production: the addition bias and phonological underspecification. Journal of Memory & Language 30, 161–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1991 b). Radical underspecification in language production. Phonology 8, 73–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1992). Vocalic underspecification in English language production. Language 68, 492–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (1991). The underspecification of coronals: evidence from language acquisition and performance error. In Paradis, C. & Prunet, J.-F., (eds), The special status of coronals. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Stoel-Gammon, C. (1983). Constraints on consonant-vowel sequences in early words. Journal of Child Language 10, 455–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed