The Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology: A Prototype Account

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in three children acquiring English. It was found that (1) children start using past inflections predominantly with achievement verbs, and progressive inflections with activity verbs; and (2) the same distributional bias is found in the speech by caretakers addressed to children. The result shows that despite claims to the contrary, early development of tense-aspect morphology is strongly influenced by the inherent aspect of the verbs, and suggests that the pattern of the development should be attributed to input and to prototype formation by children.