When regularization gets it wrong: children over-simplify language input only in production.
Jessica F Schwab, Casey Lew-Williams, Adele E Goldberg
PMID 29463337WHAT IT FOUND
Six-year-olds learning made-up language rules did not use gender in speech, often repeating one classifier.
When both options were shown, they recognized both without preference. Production tasks may understate what children recognize.
Key findings
01Children were at chance on novel puppets that required gender-based generalization.
02In production, 17 of 20 children showed a strong preference for one classifier, but no child did in the forced-choice task.
03When both options were provided, children showed awareness that each classifier fit roughly half the nouns.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a made-up language and puppets, so it is not evidence about therapy for real grammatical errors. The samples were small: 20 children and 20 adults in Experiment 1, 20 children in Experiment 2, and 8 children in the control study. It tested six-year-olds with no history of pervasive developmental delays, not children with language disorders or other clinical populations. The production and forced-choice tasks differed in memory and retrieval demands, so the comparison may reflect task difficulty rather than language knowledge alone. Children were excluded for fussiness, refusal, uninterpretable responses, instrument error, or bilingual status, which may limit generalizability. No long-term outcome was measured, so it does not show how children eventually learn real grammar.
Declared interests
No author conflict-of-interest statement is provided in the supplied text. The publication types list NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that six-year-olds cannot use gender distinctions. They failed to use gender in the made-up classifier production task, but they identified puppet gender and used he or she correctly 100% of the time in a control study, and they showed no classifier preference in a forced-choice task.