Psychology 2134A/B Lecture Notes - English Verbs, Low Frequency, Steven Pinker
9 Nov 2012
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Lecture 2. 4 learning and processing the past tense. There is a relatively fixed pattern with which children acquire past tense morphemes: -ing, plural s, possessive s, third person s, irregular past tense, regular past tense. Berko (1958) answered this question with his classic wug test. He invented a fictitious creature called a wug. He displayed one on paper with text that said this is a wug. then in another picture he had two of them with text that said add another, now there are two ___. Children filled in the missing word as wugs which conclusively proves that children do learn rules. Children as young as 3 exhibit this trait. English has about 180 irregular verbs whose past tense form is completely arbitrary. Kids effectively learn irregular verbs before regular ones however there is a period of relapse when all of a sudden their performance in using irregulars declines and they slowly work their way back up.
