UNDERSTANDING OVERREGULARIZATION PHENOMENON AMONG INDONESIAN CHILD L2 LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Young learners are known to extend verb regularity further than it actually is. When it happens, this children’s overregularization phenomenon can be a result of several reasons: a failed linguistic development due to confusion between rules and memory, a lack of feedback from adults, and problems with cognitive development. The present study attempts to present some quantitative data that may relate to the overregularization issue and bring new findings to the existing debate in the area. The 12-month spontaneous spoken data were collected longitudinally from two Indonesian young learners of L2 English living in England. Utterances containing the use of regular verbs and plural -s were carefully compiled into a database and further classified according to the different types of regularities. From this data, a few overregularization instances were recorded from the research subjects who were between two and 10 years of age. Additionally, it was also apparent that the process of learning English consecutively or successively affected the way learners apply regular rules in obligatory spoken contexts. This study is expected to become a systematic analysis of the typologies of overregularization in Indonesian–English acquisition contexts, a particular nature of the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) issue that has rarely been investigated.