Which term describes developmental mistakes where a learner over-applies a rule (e.g., saying 'speaked')?

Which term describes developmental mistakes where a learner over-applies a rule (e.g., saying 'speaked')?

• A. Overgeneralizing
• B. Transfer Errors
• C. Systematic Errors
• D. Cloze

Answer: (A)

Overgeneralization is when a learner applies a grammatical rule too broadly. In language development, children often learn a pattern like adding -ed for the past tense and then extend that rule to all verbs, producing forms such as "speaked" instead of "spoke" or "goed" instead of "went." This shows how they’re forming rules from language input and testing them, even though some verbs don’t follow the regular pattern. Other terms don’t fit as precisely: transfer errors involve applying rules from a learner’s first language to another language, a broader category, while cloze refers to a fill-in-the-blank task rather than a specific error type.