Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular…

This paper examines the role of age, working memory span and phonological ability in the mastery of ten different grammatical constructions. Six- through eleven-year-old children (n = 68) and adults (n = 19) performed a grammaticality judgment task as well as tests of working memory capacity and receptive phonological ability. Children showed…

This paper represents a preliminary attempt to determine universals of grammatical development in children. On the basis of language acquisition data, a limited number of findings are presented in the form of suggested developmental universals. These universals are grouped according to the psychological variables which may determine them, in the…

A study is described which examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Results suggested that preterites such as "taught" are not stored as separate and independent lexical units but are formed from the verb stem by means of derivational rules. (Author/RM)

That semantics interacts with syntax has been shown in psycholinguistic investigations of the processing of language by adults and of the acquisition of language by children. The few programs for language assessment and therapy that have attempted to incorporate semantic considerations have included some misunderstandings of the psycholinguistic…