Regular Verb - Psycholinguistic Aspects

Psycholinguistic Aspects

Although the causes of irregular verbs are almost exclusively historical, the way we process them is a matter for synchronic analysis and especially psycholinguistics.

A common error for small children is to conjugate irregular verbs as though they were regular. This is regarded as evidence that we learn and process our native language partly by the application of rules, rather than, as some earlier scholarship had postulated, solely by learning the forms. In fact, children often use the most common irregular verbs correctly in their earliest utterances but then switch to incorrect regular forms for a time when they begin to operate systematically. That allows a fairly precise analysis of the phases of this aspect of first language acquisition.