In the first few years of life, children already demonstrate general knowledge and understanding of basic patterns in their language.
Many studies indicate a curvilinear trend in naming errors and mistakes in initial word usage.
The same applies to the tooths example, but the language rule is the addition of the suffix '-s' to form the plural noun.
[5] Overregularization research led by Daniel Slobin argues against B.F. Skinner's view of language development through reinforcement.
Gary Marcus et al. published a study in which they monitored the speech of 83 children and recorded the spoken past tense of irregular verbs.
[7] According to Marcus, overregularization ends when the child develops sufficiently strong memory traces to irregular forms.
Maratsos argues that because children often use both the irregular and overregularized forms of the same verb, even in the same speech sample, the blocking theory proposed by Marcus proves problematic.
Moreover, the competition theory accounts for the highly varied rates of overregularization seen in Roger Brown's longitudinal study of Adam, Abe, and Sarah.
Rather, Abe's bigger vocabulary exposed him to more regular words, resulting in a stronger competition between the irregular and overregularized forms and a higher potential rate of failure.
Examples are seen in references to people (e.g. daddy for all men), animals (e.g. dog for horses and other quadrupeds), vehicles (e.g. truck for bus), foods (e.g. apple for oranges), and numerous other categories.
Predicate statements involve an attempt to comment on the relationship between an immediate referent and an absent entity.
[9] Like overgeneralizations, overextensions are believed to stem from limitations in vocabulary, which are the result of weak knowledge and/or immature retrieval ability.
Parents often respond to overextensions with acceptance, and the use of joint labeling (e.g. referring to both wolves and dogs as puppies) reinforces overextended language.
This kind of underextension is not context-bound but contextually flexible, and suggests that children are using words in a genuinely referential way.
When speaking to their children, parents may not give every instance of a category of objects its correct name, especially in unusual situations, triggering word errors.
In a study by Thomas G. White, preschool children ages 3 to 5 did not apply labels (e.g., food) to category instances that were rated as atypical by adults.