Kuczaj challenged the hypotheses that young children construct utterances by applying transformation rules to an abstract underlying structure. It is contended that Kuczaj's alternative hypotheses do not account for Hurford's data, and some of Kuczaj's new evidence actually supports the Transformational Hypothesis. (SW)

Tests the prediction that children acquiring left-branching languages will exhibit a preference for backward patterns of anaphora by presenting data from Japanese and Korean which show the prediction to be false. Findings support the view that any directionality preference for anaphora is the same for all languages. (Author/SED)

Presents an outline for a theory of syntax acquisition, surveys other approaches to language acquisition, and addresses the following methodological issues: (1) the relevance of linguistic theory to the model; (2) how the model is tested; and (3) the domain of the theory. (Author/AM)