Balanced Frequency Among Rivals in Child Spanish Morphology: A Corpus-based Study Of One Child

The study of overgeneralization provides evidence for understanding the factors that influence the application of previously acquired linguistic patterns in a novel way by children. According to the literature, frequency plays an important role in overgeneralization. For instance, overgeneralization of morphemes is less likely to occur to high frequency verbs. The aim of this study is to determine whether the elements the child retrieves to create a verbal morphological overgeneralization are of greater frequency than the target elements of their previous speech and the input. It consists of a high-density longitudinal study of a middle-class child (1;11,24-2;02,24), whose utterances were recorded daily for three months. Elements retrieved by the child to create a verbal overgeneralization were compared against the target elements of their previous speech and the input using non-parametric tests. According to the results obtained, it can be said that overgeneralized forms are associated with equal frequency patterns in the child’s speech.