Young minds’ quest for regularity: Evidence from the Turkish causative

Abstract Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 10) on an elicited production task, investigated acquisition irregular distribution in Turkish causative. Results showed that early acquisition, pin down four causative suffixes, engaged comparisons between analogous exemplars. Thereafter tackle irregularity two entertained competing hypotheses yielded overregularizations irregularizations. Overregularizations were instances abstraction across based type frequency; attempts default erroneous micro-generalizations. Negative correlation errors verb frequency suggested recovery from was sensitive token frequency. overgeneralize-then-recover pattern emerged supported integrated account roles analogy, abstraction, learning.