Examined data for two Danish children to determine subject omission, verb usage, and sentence subjects. Found that children exhibit asymmetry in subject omission according to verb type as subjects are omitted from main verb utterances more frequently than from copula utterances. Concluded that treatment of child subject omission should involve…

A study by Brown and Fraser (1963) shows that children tend to use telegraphic speech, employing content and omitting function words. This limitation involves the grammatical or semantic complexity of the sentences. Braine (1963) attempted to formulate productive rules for the initial stages in the acquisition of syntax by identifying two classes…

Subjects between 8 and 20 years of age were tested for competence on an exception to a grammatical rule, the minimal distance rule. (Authors)

By the fifth grade no differences were found between the order of adjectives in a sentence preferred by children and by adults. (ED/JD)

A study of children's structuring of complex sentences requiring mood choices is reported. The objectives were to provide data for an understanding of sentence construction problems and to form a better idea of the acquisition of the intrinsic linguistic contrasts in the Spanish modal system. (MSE)

This book focuses on the nature and development of knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar. This knowledge is inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences by preschool children. The first two stages of linguistic…

The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in children's speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule. (Author/CTM)

Fourteen specifically language-impaired children, age four to seven, pointed to pictures in, and acted out, semantically reversible sentences that varied in thematic content and in the order of thematic roles. Compared to children matched on language age and chronological age, subjects' comprehension was significantly lower. (Author/JDD)

The syntactic properties of the child's language are studied. Within the framework of transformational grammar, the rules of syntax can be divided into three types: base- or phrase-structure rules, transformational rules, and morphological rules. Each of these rules is discussed. It is stated that the one process that appears to characterize each…

A system for classifying English predicates into four families that account for all forms, moods, voices, and tenses is examined as an approach to teach grammar to students of English as a second language (ESL). It is suggested that by focusing on one family at a time, then building by combining these families, students can learn more readily to…