过度规范化是语言学习过程的一部分，在这个过程中，孩子们将规则的语法模式扩展到不规则的单词，比如用“goed”表示“go”，或用“tooth”表示“牙齿”。这也称为正则化。

Kathleen Stassen Berger说：“虽然从技术上讲是错误的，但过度规范化实际上是一种语言成熟的标志：它表明孩子们正在应用规则。”同时，史蒂文·平克和艾伦·普林斯说，“过度规范化的治疗方法，“寿命更长，因此能更频繁地听到不规则的过去式，并增强[儿童]的记忆痕迹。”

过度规范化的一个例子

"He is a perfectly healthy little boy with no more fears and worries than any other youngsters his age [two and a half], but one night he awakens screaming for Mommy and Daddy. 'Ginger bited me!' he wails. Ginger is the little cocker spaniel next door. Stevie had been playing with him that afternoon. Mother had been there the whole time. Ginger had not bitten Stevie. 'No, darling, Ginger didn't bite you!' says Mama, comforting him. 'He did. He bited me on my foot.'" (Selma H. Fraiberg, "The Magic Years")

孩子们的“错误”告诉我们什么

"Children's errors...give us an idea about the state of their developing grammar systems. In fact, it may be inappropriate even to call them errors since they are often logical forms for the child's current state of development. The kinds of variation from adult rules that children make are often not ones that parents are likely to have made in any context, so children did not learn these variations through repetition. What parent would say to a child, often enough for the child to have acquired through repetition: 'The baby goed home' or 'The baby wented home,' 'My feets hurt' or even 'My foots hurt'? In each of these utterances, it is clear that the child has figured out a commonly used structure rule but has not yet learned that there are exceptions to the rule." (Elizabeth Winkler, "Understanding Language: A Basic Course in Linguistics", 2nd ed.)

过度规范化和多元化

"[O]ne of the first rules that English-speaking children apply is to add -s to form the plural. Overregularization leads many young children to talk about 'foots', 'tooths', 'sheeps', and 'mouses'. They may even put the -s on adjectives when the adjectives are acting as nouns, as in this dinner-table exchange between my 3-year-old and her father: Sarah: I want somes.​ Father: You want some what? Sarah: I want some mores. Father: Some more what? Sarah: I want some more chickens.​ Although technically wrong, overregularization is actually a sign of verbal sophistication: it shows that children are applying the rules. Indeed, as young children become more conscious of grammatical usages, they exhibit increasingly sophisticated misapplication of them. A child who at age 2 correctly says she 'broke' a glass may at age 4 say she 'braked' one and then at age 5 say she 'did braked' another."(Kathleen Stassen Berger, "The Developing Person Through Childhood and Adolescence")

规范语言

"Regularization errors have been taken as evidence either that children rely on a template or schema for producing a stem and inflection, or that they have started to make use of an abstract rule . . .. "Many observers, from at least Rousseau on, have noticed that children tend to regularize their language, getting rid of many irregular forms in adult use. Berko (1958) was one of the first people to offer experimental evidence that by age five to seven, children had identified different inflectional affixes and were able to add them to nonsense stems they had never heard before." (Eve V. Clark, "First Language Acquisition")

过度规范化与语言发展

"[O]verregularization errors occur over protracted periods of development. Marcus et al. demonstrated that the rate of overregularization is much lower than was typically assumed, i.e., children usually do not overregularize more often than 5-10% of the irregular verbs in their expressive vocabularies at any given time. Furthermore, the correct past tense form co-occurs with the incorrect version." (Jeffrey L. Elman et al., "Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development")

来源

“通过童年和青春期成长的人”，2003年。

1994年《语言规则的现实》中的“规则和不规则形态与语法规则的心理状态”。