Previous research suggests that English-speaking children comprehend agent-patient verb passives earlier than experiencer-theme verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985). We report three experiments examining whether such effects reflect delayed acquisition of the passive syntax or instead are an artifact of the experimental task,…

Two experiments addressed how novel verbs come to be represented in the auditory input lexicon, and how the inflected forms of such novel words are acquired and recognised. Participants were introduced to new spoken forms as uninflected verbs. These varied in whether they contained a final /d/ (e.g., "confald" or "confal"). Either immediately…

The present experiments demonstrate that children as young as five years old (M = 5:2) generalize beyond their input on the basis of minimal exposure to a novel argument structure construction. The novel construction that was used involved a non-English phrasal pattern: VN[subscript 1]N[subscript 2], paired with a novel abstract meaning:…

Bilinguals appear to have shared syntactic representations for similar constructions between languages but retain distinct representations for noncognate translation-equivalents (Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007). We inquire whether bilinguals have more integrated representations of cognate translation-equivalents. To investigate…

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these…