Predicting Dutch Irregular Past Tense Production

A hotly debated research topic in language development is the acquisition of past tense, which has been seen as a test case for understanding the nature of innate knowledge and its role in language acquisition. However, previous studies have tested the acquisition of past tense via corpus analysis or elicitation tasks, in which few items are tested, resulting in limited between-item variability. To overcome these weaknesses, we analysed data from a uniquely large and longitudinal dataset containing 191 verbs, collected via an educational online platform from 38,550 Dutch-speaking children aged 8-12 years old, an age range in which errors are still present. We examined whether form-frequency, phonological neighbourhood density (PND), their interaction and telicity predict the verb-specific difficulty of past tense forms in Dutch. Our findings suggest a key role for form-frequency in the simple past and present perfect, while there is no evidence for PND and telicity.