The errors are acts of creation, in which children lift a pattern form their brief experience and apply it with impeccable logic to new words, unaware that the adult world treats them as arbitrary exceptions.
Children regularize almost anything they can.
By correlating its use with its meaning- the child can infer that -ed means past tense.
Irregular counterpart is a component called blocking: a specific form in the mental lexicon blocks the application of a general rule that would express the same grammatical notion.
Children recognize that overgeneralized forms are ungrammatical without first having to make the errors and note their parents' response.
The cure for overgeneralization is living longer, hearing irregular more often, and consolidating them in memory, improving their retrievability.
Verbs like all bits of culture, can rise or fall in popularity, and one can imagine a time when the verb to geld had slipped so far that a majority of adults lived their lives without having heard gelt.
Children regularize almost anything they can.
By correlating its use with its meaning- the child can infer that -ed means past tense.
Irregular counterpart is a component called blocking: a specific form in the mental lexicon blocks the application of a general rule that would express the same grammatical notion.
Children recognize that overgeneralized forms are ungrammatical without first having to make the errors and note their parents' response.
The cure for overgeneralization is living longer, hearing irregular more often, and consolidating them in memory, improving their retrievability.
Verbs like all bits of culture, can rise or fall in popularity, and one can imagine a time when the verb to geld had slipped so far that a majority of adults lived their lives without having heard gelt.