poor spoken grammar in bright 6 year old?

[diplodocus]

DD is 6 (year 1) and is very bright and doing extremely well at school in bith Maths and reading / writing. However, her spoken grammar is that of a much younger child. She seems completely unable to get irregular verbs or unusual plurals e.g. she'll still say "I runned after him", "Mummy buyed it" or "two mouses". She's very good at recognising patterns so I wonder if she basically just does this in speech rather than copying. We've tried repeating the phrase casually back to her with the correct word, and if you pull her up on it she can usually correct herself, but it just doesn't seem to be getting any better. Her sister is not as academic as she is, but pretty much never made gramatical errors even when much younger. Does anyone have any experience, thoughts or ideas on this? I'm not really worried and certainly don't want to make her self conscious, but wonder at what point I need to take it a bit more seriously (if at all).

My 12 yo does this occasionally...

Really don't think it's a concern at 6!

Thanks - it's just it's all the time, and none of her friends do it. Am certainly not stressing about it as she's apretty happy and confident little soul, but it seems odd.

Obviously, give her good examples to follow, but I am sure you are doing that already.

Rather than 'correct' her when she makes a mistake, just query it and see if she can correct it herself. Make sure she doesn't hear too much TV or radio bad speech. (I often wonder if toddlers who listen to Cbeebies all day will talk like the characters? Charlie and Lola do set a VERY good example! So did Blue Peter years ago, but probably not now.)

Make a note of any consistent pattern of faults, and try to work out what is causing it.

Finally, spend something under £7 at Amazon, and get her the Oxford Phonics Spelling Dictionary. This lists words according to the initial SOUND, not just the letter as in a 'normal' dictionary. For your purposes though, it also gives all the variations and 'tenses' for verbs, plurals for nouns, etc. As her reading is reasonable, she can probably read it for herself. You can see pages from it HERE:

I think this is only a 'developmental' problem, rather than anything serious, and as you have realised, it's only on 'irregular' words she is being caught out.

Is that not still normal at 6? I have a DS who has just turned 5 and he definitely still speaks in this way.

Does she do it when writing or only speaking?

I have a very articulate dd who will be 6 in a few weeks.

She has amazing vocab and will talk about lots of things, use long and complex sentences, and is easy to understand. But she does still make these type of mistakes like ''runned'' and ''gived''

I think that she recognised the patterns quite young, because she is bright, and then put those patterns into other words (like runned) and now it is a partly a habit.

I am finding that her reading is slowly ironing it out, although she will read gived instead of gave, and I have to get her to check it. Just keep modelling it correctly and it will come.

It's called generalisation and it's a very interesting language learning phenomenon that most NT kids do at some point... pretty common up until at least 7 (my ds still occasionally does it at 9). I would carry on repeating it back to her without correcting directly, and (as always) read her lots of stories in the past tense. (Write some if you need to). If she will listen to fairy stories or anything quite repetitive, that might help, but if they are too 'young' for her they may be written in the present tense.

My 6 year old also does this. She is my second child, and I am pretty relaxed about it. I think it will sort itself out with time. Her father and I both speak standard English, so that is what she is hearing at home constantly. Surely she can't help but "pick it up" eventually!

I must admit, her use of "done" instead of "did" grates on me...

Thanks all. It's really interesting.I'm sure it will all just come out in the wash but is so marked in comparison with her friends and sister. She doesn't do it when reading, but does when writing. Her sister corrects her (and has done since she was the age that DD is now) but we'll start querying it as Ferguson suggests.