Infinitives or Bare Stems? Are English-Speaking Children Defaulting to the Highest-Frequency Form?

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 41; no. 4; pp. 756 - 779
• Main Authors: Räsänen, Sanna H. M, Ambridge, Ben, Pine, Julian M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Cambridge University Press 01-07-2014
• Subjects: Case Studies; Child Language; Child, Preschool; Correlation; English; Error Patterns; Female; Humans; Imitative Behavior; Language Development; Linguistics; Male; Memory, Short-Term; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Semantics; Speech; Speech Production Measurement; Verbal Behavior; Verbs; Young Children
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000913000159

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.