Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

Generative approaches to language have long recognized the natural link between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition. The basic idea is that the knowledge representations provided by Universal Grammar enable children to acquire language as reliably as they do because these representations highlight the…

I describe the results of an experiment that bears on how children learn the lexical and syntactic properties of abstract verbs ("seem," "try") in order to distinguish the subclasses of raising ("seem") and control verbs ("try"). Previous research suggested that an inanimate subject in certain contexts leads children to suppose that the subject…