In the first stage of learning the past tense, young children correctly employ the past tense of ––
Group of answer choices
All the verbs that they encounter
A small number of common, irregular verbs
A large number of common, regular verbs
A small number of common, irregular verbs
A small number of common, irregular verbs
The correct answer is: A small number of common, irregular verbs.
To understand why this is the correct answer, we need to know a little bit about how children acquire language. When children are first learning to speak, they start by imitating the language they hear around them. They learn the basic rules of grammar and apply them to form sentences.
In the case of the past tense, children initially start by applying a simple rule to create past tense forms. For most regular verbs, they simply add "-ed" to the base form of the verb (e.g., walk becomes walked, play becomes played). This works well for many common verbs.
However, there is a subset of verbs known as irregular verbs that do not follow this regular pattern. Instead, they have unique past tense forms that need to be memorized. For example, the past tense of "go" is "went" and the past tense of "eat" is "ate".
At the early stage of learning the past tense, young children usually apply the regular "-ed" rule to all verbs they encounter, including irregular ones. This means that they might say "goed" instead of "went" or "eated" instead of "ate". With practice and exposure to correct language usage, children eventually learn the correct past tense forms of irregular verbs.
So, in summary, young children initially make errors in applying the past tense rule to all verbs they encounter. However, over time, they learn the correct past tense forms of a small number of common, irregular verbs.