Responses to CHILDES inquiry about overregularization errors in children with autism

Tue Apr 25 09:27:32 UTC 2006

Many thanks for the many helpful responses I resceived to my request
about overregularization errors in children with autism.

Here is a summary of the responses I received.

Helen Tager-Flusberg commented that she didn't look at
overregularization errors directly in her longitudinal studies of 6
children with autism (data available via CHILDES), but has recently
published relevant data using elicitation tasks with older children:

Roberts, J., Rice, M.L., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2004). Tense marking in
children with autism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 429-448.

(Thanks also to Jenny Roberts for providing a reference to this
paper).

Kate Loveland (thanks to John N. Bohannon III for providing the
contact) made the following comment:

"I'm actually not an expert on grammar in children with autism,
although just from observation I would think it quite likely that
many, though not all of them, do pass through the over-regularization
errors on their way to more developed grammar.  However, I will refer
you to my colleague Helen Tager-Flusberg who specializes in language
development in children with autism". 

Inge-Marie Eigsti (thanks to Letty Naigles for providing the contact)
has relevant data in press:

Eigsti, IM, Bennetto, L, Dadlani, MB. (In press). Beyond pragmatics:
Morphosyntactic development in autism. Journal of Autism and
Developmental Disorders.

A pdf version is available from her website:
http://eigsti.psy.uconn.edu/ <http://eigsti.psy.uconn.edu/> 

She summarised the relevant results as follows:

"As you'll see, the manuscript discusses a variety of indices of
language development, including errors, although the entire focus is
not on errors; however, you'll find a table that presents the sum
total of overregularization errors in each of 3 groups, including ASD.
If I recall correctly, error rates are extremely low in each sample,
less than 4 or 5 per group".

Hilke Elsen provided the following reference:

Elsen, H. (1998). The acquisition of past participles: One or two
mechanisms. In: Fabri, R., Ortmann, A., Parodi, T. Models of
Inflection. Tuebingen: Niemeyer. 134-151.

Mariana Sigstad provided the following account of the role of
overregularization in the grammatical development of children with
autism, based on her experiences as a mother of child with an autistic
spectrum disorder, and working with children with autism. She suggests
that children with autism learn by association. They require feedback
about correct usage to learn to avoid making overregularization
errors. For example, if a child says "Paul eated all the porridge",
and you continue the conversation without making a correction, the
child will take that sentence as valid. Furthermore, children with
autism can find it difficult to identify errors in sentences and
pictures, which is one of the reasons they don't enjoy a joke. So they
have to learn to find what is not correct in an overregularization.

Charlotte Koster & Evelien Krikhaar summarised their related work on
overregularization in children at risk for dyslexia as follows:

"Here in the Netherlands, we have been following the linguistic
development of roughly 150 children at familial risk for dyslexia and
100 typically developing children. Their parents fill in the CDI and
the KINT (designed by us, for older children) every 6 months, starting
at 17 months. Just thought you would like to know that the at-risk
children show fewer overregularizations in past participles (35m) and
past tense (41m), accompanied by fewer correct forms. We will be
presenting a paper on this topic at CLS-Newcastle this summer".

Michael Ullman made reference to the following chapter in press:

Walenski, M., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Ullman, M. (in press). "Chapter
10: Language in Autism". In S. O. Moldin & J. L. R. Rubenstein (eds),
Understanding Autism: From Basic Neuroscience to Treatment. CRC Press.
Due Spring 2006.

Once again, thanks for the helpful comments.

Best wishes

Julian

Dr Julian Lloyd, B.A., PGC (TLHE), Ph.D. 
Senior Lecturer in Psychology 
Newman College of Higher Education 
Bartley Green 
Birmingham B32 3NT 
Tel 0121 476 1181 
Email j.t.lloyd at newman.ac.uk 
Website: http://www.newman.ac.uk/ 