Räsänen Sanna H M, Ambridge Ben, Pine Julian M
University of Liverpool.
J Child Lang. 2014 Jul;41(4):756-79. doi: 10.1017/S0305000913000159. Epub 2013 Jul 8.
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.
说英语的幼儿常常会说出缺少第三人称单数词尾“-s”的句子（例如，He play）。自20世纪90年代中期以来，这类错误往往被视为不定式错误（OI），即动词采用非限定形式（例如，韦克斯勒，1998；莱盖特和杨，2007）。本文报告了一项针对22名儿童（年龄在3岁1个月至4岁1个月之间）的横断面诱发产出研究结果，该研究调查了至少一些明显的不定式错误是否反映了一种默认采用输入中出现频率最高形式的过程。在48个动词中，在一个具有代表性的输入语料库中，“裸词”形式与第三人称单数词尾“-s”形式的比例与第三人称单数词尾“-s”的产出率之间存在显著的负相关。这一发现表明，除了其他在跨语言中导致此类错误的学习机制外，说英语的儿童产生的至少一些不定式错误反映了一种默认采用高频/语音简单形式的过程。
