Gradually increasing context-sensitivity shapes the development of children's verb marking: A corpus study

There is substantial evidence that children's apparent omission of grammatical morphemes in utterances such as “She play tennis” and “Mummy eating” is in fact errors of commission in which contextually licensed unmarked forms encountered in the input are reproduced in a context-blind fashion. So how do children stop making such errors? In this study, we test the assumption that children's ability to recover from error is related to their developing sensitivity to longer-range dependencies. We use a pre-registered corpus analysis to explore the predictive value of different cues with regards to children's verb-marking errors and observe a developmental pattern consistent with this account. We look at context-independent cues (the identity of the specific verb being used) and at the relative value of context-dependent cues (the identity of the specific subject+verb sequence being used). We find that the only consistent effect across a group of 2- to 3-year-olds and a group of 3- to 4-year-olds is the relative frequency of unmarked forms of specific subject+verb sequences being used. The relative frequency of unmarked forms of the verb alone is predictive only in the younger age group. This is consistent with an account in which children recover from making errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to context, at first the immediately preceding lexical contexts (e.g., the subject that precedes the verb) and eventually more distant grammatical markers (e.g., the fronted auxiliary that precedes the subject in questions).

Research Highlights

• We provide a corpus analysis investigating input effects on young children's verb-marking errors (e.g., Mummy go) across development (between 2 and 4 years of age).
• We find evidence that these apparent errors of omission are in fact input-driven errors of commission that persist into the third year of life.
• We compare the relative effect on error rates of context-independent (e.g., verb) and context-dependent (e.g., subject+verb sequence) cues across developmental time.
• Our findings support the proposal that children recover from making verb-marking errors by becoming progressively more sensitive to preceding context.