Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared…

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal "-s" until five- six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal "-s" as young as 1;4. These apparently conflicting findings can…

Investigated whether children age 2; age 0-2; and 2 years used grammatical and caregiver cues in sentence comprehension and how different types of cues interacted. Children listened to sentences and identified pictures. Results indicated that children used caregiver cues (e.g., short length and position of key words) in sentence comprehension.…

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap…