Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The initial phase of linguistic production by children is char-acterized by rote-learned, lexically restricted forms and con-structions. Only during later phases of language acquisitiondo they develop flexibility across a paradigm and mix lexicaland grammatical material more freely. In the development ofverb morphology, a correlation between the use of tense andaspect has been observed in many languages. It has been sug-gested that this leads to an intermediary state of paradigm cat-egorization based on temporal categories. So far the flexibilityof individual verbs occurring in different tense-aspect combi-nations has not been examined in detail. Here we evaluate theflexibility of verb use in a large longitudinal corpus of 4 Rus-sian children. We compute the Shannon entropy of verb stemsdistributed over individual grammatical forms. Results showthat children do not pass through a stage of paradigm cate-gorization based on aspecto-temporal categories. After a briefitem-specific phase of rote learned forms, they quickly becomeflexible users of verbs in both aspects.