Túláltalános

Túláltalános is a Hungarian term used to describe overgeneralization—the act or result of applying a general rule too broadly, beyond the domain where it is valid. It is used across disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive psychology, and logic to refer to errors in reasoning or language learning where broad rules are extended to cases they do not cover.

The word is formed from túl (over) and általános (general). In cognitive psychology and second-language acquisition, túláltalánosítás denotes the phenomenon where learners apply a grammatical rule to all instances, including exceptions. A well-known example in English is overgeneralizing the past tense rule by saying goed instead of went, or adding -ed to irregular verbs like “goed” or “eated.” In logic, overgeneralization can lead to fallacies when a conclusion about a subset is unjustifiably extended to a larger set.

Túláltalánosítás also appears in everyday reasoning, where people infer broad conclusions from insufficient or unrepresentative evidence. Related concepts include generalization in statistics and the linguistic notion of regularization errors in language development. In Hungarian-language discourse, discussions of this phenomenon often use the noun túláltalánosítás to label the error and contrast it with correct generalization.

See also: hasty generalization, generalization, language acquisition.