Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

This review of research into the acquisition of grammatical coordination (i.e., the use of conjunctions) pulls together both English language and cross-linguistic data. Although the importance of pragmatic factors in language acquisition is not denied, the data make it clear that grammatical factors seem to play a significant role in the…

In four studies, 60 two- and three-year-olds were studied in an elicited imitation task wherein the linguistic form of sentences was varied according to conjunction structure and pattern of redundancy deletion in conjunction reduction. Both factors were found to affect imitation. (Author/RM)

Garman (1974), reporting on 20 Tamil children aged 3 to 5, postulated a linguistic strategy and 2 prelinguistic strategies to explain results of a question-picture choice task involving sentences with embedded and subordinate clauses. Reanalysis of this data identifies four processing strategies and argues that certain grammatical sensitivities…