Linguistic Overgeneralization: A Case Study

The current study described a single child’s language acquisition. The importance of this study resided in the circumstances and the environment in which the child lived. He came from a family in which the parents were from different countries and cultures; spoke different Arabic dialects and who lived in a country in which English is spoken. The child was in his critical period of language acquisition. He seemed to have established a unique way of communicating with people surrounding him to cope with all the linguistic varieties around him. The study showed that the child had semantic, syntactic and morphological overgeneralized structures. The data and results showed that overgeneralization and language acquisition were primarily an innate faculty of the human mind and that imitation did played a primary role in language acquisition. It showed, nevertheless, that imitation and behaviorist approaches could not fully account for language acquisition nor did the generative approach. The results went in favor of an Emergentist approach of language acquisition where both innateness and imitations were crucial constituents of children’s acquisition of linguistic forms.