Overregularization and Linguistic Creativity
Toddlers display remarkable creativity with their language. A well-known example of their creativity is verb tense overgeneralization. Overregularization is caused by 'lexical exceptions' to a rule. For example, the verb 'see' has an irregular past tense 'saw', and so toddlers may say 'seed' instead. A much for powerful demonstration of their creativity is found when toddlers use an exceptionless syntactic pattern to express a novel idea. For example, they might create the phrase "elephant bars" on the model of "monkey bars" or "sword dolphin" on the model of "swordfish". This syntactic pattern is called 'noun-noun modification'. The first noun modifies the meaning of the second noun, the second noun being the 'head' of the noun phrase. Clearly, toddlers are using an abstract syntactic pattern to express novel meanings. This form of linguistic creativity is not due to a mere ‘lexical exception’, but is rather an expression of the way speakers of a language use the rules of their language to create new linguistic expressions.