= Verb regularization
<Verb regularization> is a form of <language change> in which an exceptional verb form is replaced by one following a productive grammatical pattern. For English past forms, this can mean adopting the `-ed` pattern rather than retaining an inherited alternative. Historical change in a speech community is distinct from a child's occasional application of a pattern to an irregular <verb>.
A quantitative study by <Erez Lieberman> and collaborators tracked irregular verbs across historical stages and identified `help` among verbs that became regular.<Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language by Erez Lieberman and others>[opening discussion and Fig.1, historical examples and usage-frequency bins]{ref} A hypothetical series with regular forms in 12 of 40 past-tense uses at one stage and 32 of 40 at another would show the regular variant's proportion rising from $0.3$ to $0.8$. Those counts alone would not establish the cause: recording practices, speaker composition and competing variants must also be checked. Regularization describes a pattern of <inflection>, not a judgment that the newer form is intrinsically better.
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