Developing a meaningful account of the acquisition of the English past tense.

The data consist of quantitative information on the proportion of children (aged 2-5yrs) who produced correct past tense verb forms, and associated errors, for a large number of early learned verbs. Children (N = 908) between the ages of 2;6 and 5;5 (years;months) were tested on their ability to produce the simple past tense using two sentence completion paradigms. One paradigm involved producing a past tense form in response to a modelled progressive verb form (Inflection from form); the other involved producing a past tense form to describe a simple animation with no prior verb modelling (Inflection from meaning). 300 target verbs were elicited in the Inflection from form task, and 120 target verbs in the Inflection from meaning task. Children's responses were coded according to their accuracy and a variety of error types. For each verb, the mean proportion of correct responses, use of uninflected verb forms, and overregularisation errors on irregular verbs are reported, along with the number of children attempting each verb in each age group (2;6-3;5, 3;6-4;5, 4;6-5;5) and on each task.