MOSAIC+: a cross-linguistic model of verb-marking in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder
This study extends an existing cross-linguistic model of verb-marking error in children’s early multi-word speech (MOSAIC) by adding a novel mechanism that defaults to the most frequent form of the verb where this accounts for a high proportion of forms in the input. Our simulations show that the resulting dual-factor model not only provides a better explanation of the data on typically developing (TD) children, but also captures the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), including the tendency of English-speaking children to show higher rates of Optional Infinitive (OI) errors and the tendency of Dutch-, German- and Spanish-speaking children to show higher rates of agreement errors. The new version of MOSAIC thus provides a unified cross-linguistic model of the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and children with DLD.