Overgeneralization Errors In Child Speech: English And Uzbek Examples
Keywords:
overgeneralization, overregularization, overextension, child language acquisition, morphology, agglutinative languages, English, Uzbek, U-shaped development.Abstract
This paper examines overgeneralization errors in the speech of young children acquiring English and Uzbek as first languages. Overgeneralization is understood as the extension of a linguistic rule or word meaning beyond its conventional domain of application, as in English goed for went or mouses for mice. Such errors are widely regarded as evidence that children do not simply imitate adult speech but actively construct grammatical generalizations. The study compares morphological, lexical and phonological types of overgeneralization in a fusional-analytic language (English) and an agglutinative Turkic language (Uzbek). It is argued that in English overgeneralization chiefly affects irregular inflection, whereas in Uzbek, where suffixation is highly regular, it mostly appears at morpheme boundaries, in stem alternations such as vowel elision and consonant voicing. The paper concludes that the typological profile of a language shapes where overgeneralization occurs, while the underlying cognitive mechanism of rule extension is common to both languages. Pedagogical and speech-therapy implications are briefly discussed.
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