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In our recent paper, "Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax" ("Journal of Child Language" 31, 61-99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high frequency in the language to which children are exposed. We adopted two different categorization schemes to determine whether individual verbs should be considered to be semantically general, or "light", or whether they encoded more specific semantics. These categorization schemes were based on previous work in the literature on the role of semantically general verbs in early verb acquisition, and were designed, in the first case, to be a conservative estimate of semantic generality, including only verbs designated as semantically general by a number of other researchers (e.g. Clark, 1978; Pinker, 1989; Goldberg, 1998), and, in the second case, to be a more inclusive estimate of semantic generality based on Ninio's (1999a,b) suggestion that grammaticalizing verbs encode the semantics associated with semantically general verbs. Under this categorization scheme, a much larger number of verbs were included as semantically general verbs.

Children's acquisition of English past tense and plural inflection has provided evidence for widely differing theories of morphological representation. The debate has tended to focus on the question of whether [...], In the 'blocking-and-retrieval-failure' account of overregularization (OR; G. F. Marcus, 1995; G. F. Marcus et al., 1992), the claim that a symbolic rule generates regular inflection is founded on pervasively low past tense OR rates and the lack of a substantive difference between past tense and plural OR rates. Evidence of extended periods of OR in the face of substantial correct input (M. Maratsos, 2000) and of an initial period in which nouns are more likely to be overregularized than verbs (V. A. Marchman, K. Plunkett, & J. Goodman, 1997) casts doubt on the blocking account and suggests instead an interplay between type and token frequency effects that is more consistent with usage-based approaches (e.g., J. Bybee, 1995; K. K6pcke, 1998; K. Plunkett & V. Marchman, 1993). However, previous naturalistic studies have been limited by data that account for only 1-2% of child speech. The current study reports analyses of verb and noun ORs in a dense naturalistic corpus (1 child, 2;00.12-3;11.06 [years;months.days])that captures 8-10% of child speech and input. The data show (a) a marked difference in verb and noun OR rates; (b) evidence of a relationship between relative regular/ irregular type frequencies and the onset and rate of past tense and plural ORs; (c) substantial OR periods for some verbs and nouns despite hundreds of correct tokens in child speech and input; and (d) a strong negative correlation between input token frequencies and OR rates for verbs and nouns. The implications of these findings for blocking and other accounts of OR are discussed. KEY WORDS: language acquisition, morphology, overregularization, past tense, plural