Reports elicited production and grammaticality judgment data from three experiments on the status of resumptive pronouns in English. Participants were children and adults. Examined children's acquisition of syntax in light of development of linguistic processing systems. (Author/VWL)

Errors involving universal quantification are common in contexts depicting sets of individuals in partial, one-to-one correspondence. In this article, we explore whether quantifier-spreading errors are more common with distributive quantifiers each and every than with all. In Experiments 1 and 2, 96 children (5- to 9-year-olds) viewed pairs of…

Presents the results of an empirical study of the interpretation of left branch "combien" (how many) extractions in English-French interlanguage. Results show that knowledge of the interpretation of left-branch "combien" extraction is detectable in English-French interlanguage. (Author/VWL)

This article proposes an explanation for the use of resumptives in child language based on the feature of the nominal system. A cross-linguistic comparison shows no significant difference in resumptive use between child French, child English, and child Spanish. (50 references) (JL)

Presents a new syntactical analysis of the negative marker "no" in child English. Claims that the majority of "no" constructions in early child English are determiner phrases in which "no" appears as a determiner. The claim is supported on the basis of distributional and morphosyntactic tests, a discourse analysis of children's elliptical…

This study documents the sensitivity of English-French interlanguage to the process-result distinction with respect to the licensing of multiple postnominal genitives, despite a lack of direct positive or negative evidence for this distinction in the input. Documentation argues that the Universal Grammar-governed map between syntactic structures…

Four experiments on the acquisition of binding are compared, two conducted with Italian-speaking children and two with English-speaking children. English-speaking children's mastery of pronominal binding is found to lag behind their mastery of binding for anaphors and R-expressions. (61 references) (Author/LB)

Examines the development of nominative and oblique subject pronouns in preschool speakers of English, finding that oblique subject forms occur in the earliest language of the children and reappear in connection with wh-questions and related constructions. (57 references) (MDM)

Reports a case study of a British 2-year old that shows a stage in syntactic development without a subject agreement protection but with a tense phrase. A sharp contrast in use of verb forms suggests that the child had left the Optional Infinitive stage and entered a transitional stage, where the major development is that the status of the bare…

Research is reported showing that children are lexically conservative in the domain of learning argument omissibility. Two studies (one observational case study, one experimental) show a relationship between the argument frames used in input and those used by child subjects. (Contains 38 references.) (Author/LB)