Regular Past Tense -ed in Spontaneous Sentences

Domain: expressive language Settings: school, private-practice, early-intervention Support: minimal Severity: moderate Age: ages 4-7

The Four Questions

Conditions

Given a structured task that elicits past-tense contexts (story retell, picture sequence, recount of recent event)

Observable Behavior

[Student] will produce regular past tense -ed in obligatory contexts (e.g., 'walked,' 'jumped,' 'painted')

Measurable Criteria

with 80% accuracy across 3 consecutive data collection sessions

Measurement Method

as measured by SLP transcription and obligatory-context analysis of 20+ utterance samples

Full Goal

Given a structured task that elicits past-tense contexts (story retell, picture sequence, recount of recent event), [Student] will produce regular past tense -ed in obligatory contexts (e.g., ‘walked,’ ‘jumped,’ ‘painted’) with 80% accuracy across 3 consecutive data collection sessions, as measured by SLP transcription and obligatory-context analysis of 20+ utterance samples.

Individualization Guidance

Before using this goal, verify:

Obligatory-context analysis, not raw counts. The denominator is the number of contexts where past tense was required, not the total number of utterances. A student who avoids past-tense contexts can hit a misleadingly high “accuracy” rate on raw counts. Score against obligatory contexts only.
Dialect considerations. In African American English (AAE) and other varieties, past-tense -ed marking can be variable as a rule-governed feature of the dialect — not as a deficit. Confirm with a dialect-appropriate language sample before targeting -ed as a goal. Misidentifying dialect features as disorder is a documented diagnostic error.
Allomorphic context. The /-d/, /-t/, and /-ɪd/ allomorphs follow phonological rules. If the student has a phonological disorder affecting /t/ and /d/, distinguish a morphological omission (“walk” for “walked”) from a phonological deletion (“wak” for “walked”). The two require different goals.
Irregular past tense is a separate goal. Don’t bundle “went,” “ate,” “ran” with regular -ed. Irregulars are lexical items; -ed is a productive rule.
Why this marker. Tense and agreement morphemes (including -ed and third-person singular -s) are sensitive clinical markers of DLD in English. Productivity here often improves grammaticality more broadly.

Clinical Notes

Targeting -ed as a productive rule means moving from imitation through structured elicitation to spontaneous obligatory contexts. The criterion is set at 80% in spontaneous obligatory contexts because lower thresholds can be met with rote memorization of high-frequency forms (jumped, walked) without rule generalization to novel verbs.

A 20-utterance sample is the minimum for a defensible obligatory-context score. Smaller samples produce unstable percentages: a single missed context can swing accuracy by 10 percentage points. If the student is highly verbal, push to 50 utterances.

Document the types of past-tense verbs the student produces correctly versus omits. Generalization to low-frequency or novel verbs (e.g., a verb introduced for the first time in session) is the strongest evidence of rule learning.

Narrative Macrostructure in Personal and Story Retells — discourse-level expressive goal that naturally elicits past tense

Evidence Base

ASHA Practice Portal: Spoken Language Disorders
Rice, M.L., & Wexler, K. (1996). Toward tense as a clinical marker of SLI in English-speaking children. JSLHR, 39(6).
Brown, R. (1973). A First Language: The Early Stages. Harvard University Press.
Leonard, L.B. (2014). Children with Specific Language Impairment (2nd ed.). MIT Press.
Bishop, D.V.M., et al. (2017). Phase 2 of CATALISE. JCPP, 58(10).
IDEA (34 C.F.R. § 300.320) — IEP measurability requirements