Is Therapy Required? Past Tense Verb Errors and Your Toddler

“Does my toddler need therapy? She has so many past tense verb errors. She’s all mixed up!”

My son loves shooting his basketball into his toddler hoop. Starting about a year ago, and continuing on even now into his preschool years, he’ll proudly proclaim “Mom! I hooped it!” How cute is that!? I submit: super cute! And I’m sure that your toddler or preschooler is saying equally delightful things. However, if you’re not familiar with child language development, you might be concerned by errors like this when your child otherwise seems to have well-developed, mature sounding speech and language.

And those concerns make sense. After all, most children, without speech and language delays, progress steadily from coos and babbles to consonant and vowel sound play to word approximates that are single syllables to closer and closer approximates to the intended word with more and more syllables. Then come word combinations, littles sentences…and before you know it, your toddler is having a full conversations with you!

But, along that path there are many, many, many errors. And learning attempts. And things that make us giggle. For the average toddler, past tense verb errors are one of the most classic forms of “cute errors”. Almost every toddler passes through it at one point or another and it is an expected, predictable and totally normal toddler and preschooler speech error.

What ARE past tense verbs?

“The past tense morpheme [*] is added to verbs to talk about an action or event that is finished or happened at an earlier time. For most verbs, past tense verb is marked by adding [the morpheme] –ed (e.g., walked, carried); [these are referred to as “regular” past tense verbs] …. there are some verbs called irregular verbs that have special past tense forms which must be memorized. Examples include: ate, drank, ran, hit, hurt, went, saw, and gave.” (Gotzke & Sample Gosse, 2007).

*a morpheme is a unit that adds meaning to words but can’t be used as a stand-alone word (re-, -ed, -ing)

Why is the past tense so tricky to learn?

There are several reasons why learning correct verb tense usage can be tricky, especially past tense verb usage.

Learning the Concept of time itself is hard

The first reason is that learning time concepts in general is tricky! There are a lot of linguistic and cognitive processes and concepts that must be understood and connected to correctly understand and speak about time. It takes years of exposure to time concepts before children fully grasp it. (We’re talking into the school years).

Simple past, present and future time concepts can be more straightforward (although it still takes a while to grasp fully) but then time can quickly grow more complex. “A sense of the past and future not only involves judging events as belonging to the past or the future, but also an understanding of the conceptual relations between the past and future. For example, a past event, but not a future event, could physically affect the present state of affairs. The past, but not the future, can be known; the future, but not the past, can be altered” (Zhang & Hudson, 2018).

And all of that isn’t even getting into talking about the future from a frame of reference in the past as opposed to the present; hypothetical future experiences, etc… It can get confusing and tricky really quick!

English has lots of exceptions to the rules

Additionally, verbalizing time concepts, especially in English, brings even more complexity. English has a million and one exceptions to every rule. A child may learn that “-ed” is used at the end of a verb to indicate the past. And then they discover that “-ed” can also be used to express a present or future event “e.g. ‘The dog is being/will be groomed by the man’” (Bishop, 2014).

Or they might learn that in some instances “-ed” isn’t used at all. “[F]or instance, we say ‘I saw him jump’ or ‘I wanted to escape’ rather than ‘*I saw him jumped’ or ‘*I wanted to escaped’”. Yet we say “John jumped” and “I escaped” (Bishop, 2014).

English is a funny language. It’s amazing kids figure out their verb tenses at all!

Common Past Tense Verb errors in Young Children

Not Including any tense markers at all

“Sometimes we see bare stem errors, where the inflection is simply omitted, as in ‘John go there’ or ‘Yesterday Daddy run the marathon’” (Bishop, 2014).

Overgeneralizing Regular Past Tense

It’s fairly typical for young children to modify verbs that should be irregular past tense using regular past tense verb rules. This is one of the most common kind of past tense verb errors. Children learn that they simply need to add “-ed” to the end of the verb to make it past tense. They then apply that rule to all verbs in the past tense.

Examples of this include:

• “She ran away” –> “She runned away”
• “I ate it” –> “I eated it”

Overgeneralizing one irregular form onto other irregular forms

“Children may overextend irregular forms across other irregular past tense verbs. For example, [a child may overgeneralize] his knowledge of the irregular past tense form sang, [and say], “I brang my backpack” instead of “I brought my backpack”” (Gotzke & Sample Gosse, 2007).

Age of mastery for time concepts and for correct grammar usage

Understanding the “average” age of mastery for time concepts, and their corresponding correct grammar usage, turns out to be a hard thing to pin down. For simplicity, we won’t go into all the details but if you’re interested in reading up on all the intricacies, I’ll refer you to this article: The Development of Temporal Concepts: Linguistic Factors and Cognitive Processes.

Here are some highlights of the process of learning time concepts as accessed from Ages & Stages: How Children Develop a Sense of Time:

Stage by Stage 3-4

• Time is still very much an abstract concept for threes and fours.
• Preschoolers need lots of personal experiences with time (snacktime, storytime) in order to develop an understanding of time concepts.
• Before and after are two concepts of time that preschoolers can now understand.

Stage by Stage 5-6

• Kindergartners define time by recognizable events and symbols.
• Five- and 6-year-olds learn about time by observing and recording it (for example, charting the weather).
• Five- and 6-year-olds are beginning to understand that certain events occur at a defined time each day.

As far as mastering irregular verbs goes, this can also extend beyond the kindergarten years. However, generally speaking, children have a solid grasp of the most common irregular verbs between 25 and 46 months (or roughly two to four years of age) (Gotzke & Sample Gosse, 2007).

Your child might need therapy if…

Therapy might be recommended for your child if

• they are older than preschool years (3-4 years old) and still not showing a solid understanding of the most common irregular verbs (examples include: sat, ran, ate, came, went, slept)
• their speech is so full of grammar errors that you frequently can’t follow a conversation without concentrating (this would include errors beyond past tense verb errors)

Even if your child doesn’t meet either of the above criteria, if you have questions or concerns, feel free to chat with your child’s school Speech-Language Pathologist and/or classroom teacher. If you child is not yet in school, you can contact a local private therapist or your local Early Intervention Program (in the United States).

If you’re concerned about other facets of your child’s speech and language development, take a look at this page regarding toddler intelligibility.

Hello! I’m Briana!