Patricia, a three-year-old girl, is having dinner. She looks at her father and says, "I eated food." In this scenario, Patricia is exhibiting _________.
A)divergent thinking
B)cognitive dissonance
C)overregularization
D)counterconditioning

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Patricia is exhibiting overregularization, which is a common error made by young children when they apply a regular grammatical rule even to irregular cases. In this case, the rule of adding "-ed" to form the past tense is applied to the irregular verb "eat" resulting in "eated" instead of "ate".

Patricia, a Three-Year-Old Girl, Is Having Dinner