A central question in language acquisition is how children build linguistic representations that allow them to generalize verbs from one construction to another (e.g., "The boy gave a present to the girl" ? "The boy gave the girl a present"), whilst appropriately constraining those generalizations to avoid non-adultlike errors…

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model…

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., "Lisa poured water into the cup"; "*Lisa poured the cup with water"), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., "*Bart filled water into the cup"; "Bart filled the cup with water"), and others…

Is language governed by formal rules or by analogy to stored exemplars? The acquisition of the English past tense has long played a central role in this debate. In the present study, children rated the acceptability of a regular and an irregular past-tense form of each of 40 novel verbs (e.g., "fleeped", "flept") using a…