The "wanna" facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: "Wanna" is grammatical in certain contexts ("Who do you want PRO to play with?") but not others ("Who do you want who[strikethrough] to play with you?"). On a standard analysis, "contraction" to "wanna" is blocked by some…

Two recent proposals link the use of nonagreeing "don't" to the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage. Guasti & Rizzi (2002) argue for a misset parameter involving how agreement is spelled out. Schütze (2010) proposes that Infl is underspecified in child language and that "do" surfaces to support the contracted clitic/affix…

A comparison of the error profiles of monolingual (child L1) learners of Dutch, Moroccan children (child L2) and Moroccan adults (adult L2) learning Dutch as their L2 shows that participants in all groups massively overgeneralize [-neuter] articles to [+neuter] contexts. In all groups, the reverse gender mistake infrequently occurs. Gender…

Children aged three to six were shown drawings of three objects that were identical except for differences in size in one or both dimensions. Each child was asked to determine if one object was the tallest. A missing feature model was not supported, since a child was often correct for some items and incorrect for others. Errors were partially…

Found dissociations between regular and irregular inflectional processes in the formation of English past tenses, German noun plurals, and German participles. Children's inflectional errors include using regular patterns for irregular forms. Some linguistic processes, such as forming compound words, are sensitive to the distinction between regular…

Overgeneralization occurs when a child uses the wrong word to name an object and is often observed in the early stages of word learning. We develop a method to elicit overgeneralizations in the laboratory by priming children to say the names of objects perceptually similar to known and unknown target objects. Experiment 1 examined 18 two-year-old…

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

In a study of very young children's pronunciation of nouns and verbs, ten children aged 20 to 25 months were exposed to experimental nouns and verbs, which had not yet been comprehended or produced by the children. Each of the objects and actions was given an experimental name based on phonemes in the children's speech. These objects and actions…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

This report describes a study conducted to discover whether children with language delay would respond differently from normal children on two identically itemed tests of knowledge of adjectives and prepositions, one of which using objects as stimuli and the other using pictorial stimuli. It was hypothesized that the test using objects would be…

Forty normal children aged 3 and-one-half to 5 and-one-half were tested on the pronunciation of initial /-1/, /-r/, and /s-/ clusters in 120 words, occurring 36, 48, and 42 times, respectively; other phonemes in the cluster occurred from 6 to 18 times. Articulation errors of individual subjects were examined for evidence of (1) degree and type of…

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)

While children aged 1;10 and 2;1 show only a modest rate of mapping novel nouns onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects, children aged 1;4 and 1;8 show a high rate. Two studies with young 2-year olds found the noun-mapping preference prevalent, but unless initial choices are strongly reinforced, increase in salience of familiar kinds lures…

Some results of seven studies of children's native Finnish language acquisition from 1971-1980 are summarized, focusing on two aspects: the main features in the development of Finnish inflection forms in 2-7-year-old children, and selected information derived from children's errors at the various age levels. Subjects were 260 children attending…

A study of children's acquisition of the auxiliary verb system in English is reported. The first section describes the operation of the auxiliary system, and proposes that the behavior of auxiliaries is so complicated that if children were to generalize from one auxiliary to another, they would make predictable errors. The second section reviews…