Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children acquire grammatical case as a unified system or in a piecemeal fashion. In English language acquisition, many children make developmental errors in marking case on subject position pronouns (e.g., "Me" do it, "Him" like it). It is unknown whether children who produce…

This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific…

It has been argued that children learning a second language (L2) omit agreement inflection because of communication demands. The conclusion of these studies is that L2 children know the morphological and syntactic properties of agreement inflection, but sometimes insert an inflectional default form (i.e., the bare verb) in production. The present…

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…

This paper examines two issues concerning nonagreeing "don't" in child English, e.g., "He don't fit". (1) Do children know that "don't" consists of auxiliary "do" plus sentential negation, or do they misanalyze it simply as negation? I argue that the former claim yields both empirical (distributional) and conceptual advantages, while the latter…

English-acquiring children frequently make pronoun case errors, while German-acquiring children rarely do. Nonetheless, German-acquiring children frequently make article case errors. It is proposed that when child-directed speech contains a high percentage of case-ambiguous forms, case errors are common in child language; when percentages are low,…

This dissertation investigates the acquisition of early verb inflection in child Slovenian from morphosyntactic and morphophonological perspectives. It centers on the phenomenon of root nonfinites, particularly the patterns of omission and substitution errors in verb inflection marking. It argues that every acquisition model needs to account…

In this study, we use corpus analysis and computational modelling techniques to compare two recent accounts of the OI stage: Legate & Yang's (2007) Variational Learning Model and Freudenthal, Pine & Gobet's (2006) Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children. We first assess the extent to which each of these accounts can explain the level of OI errors…

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in…

The role of homophony in language change and in child morphological acquisition has often been made recourse to. Regarding the former it has been proposed that the threat of homophony can prevent a sound change from going to completion. With respect to the latter, it has been vaguely and contradictorily claimed that homophonous morphological…

In this study, we investigate whether specific language impairment (SLI) manifests itself grammatically in the same way in Spanish and English with respect to nominal plural marking. English-speaking children with SLI are very proficient at marking plural on nouns. Spanish has two main nominal plural allomorphs: /s/ and /es/. The /es/ allomorph…

Discusses results of study that attempted to determine whether subject-auxiliary inversion occurs in yes-no questions before wh-questions and whether noninversion errors are characteristic feature of acquisition of wh-questions. Findings do not support previous claims that inversion is acquired in yes-no questions before wh-questions. Rather,…

Analyzed correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's wh-question data. Argues that two current movement rule accounts cannot explain patterning of early wh-questions. Data can be explained by the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and inversion and universion…

This article reviews and criticizes Fay's particular transformational descriptions as implausible. (Author/NCR)