In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on…

Two studies investigated syntactic productivity in three-year-old Mandarin speakers' use of verbs in the SVO and S"ba"OV constructions. In Study 1, children were taught novel verbs in one construction and assessed for their production in the other construction. Children produced verbs taught in the "ba" constructions in…

We report a syntactic priming experiment that examined whether children's acquisition of the passive is a staged process, with acquisition of constituent structure preceding acquisition of thematic role mappings. Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds described transitive actions after hearing active and passive prime descriptions involving the same or…

How do children develop the mapping between prosody and other levels of linguistic knowledge? This question has received considerable attention in child language research. In the present study two experiments were conducted to investigate four- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's sensitivity to prosody in ambiguity resolution. Experiment…

The acquisition of "to" in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. Results support the conclusion that the verb system is a determining factor in the acquisition of linguistic structure. (SED)

Presents experimental evidence supporting the assertion that successive single-word utterances share certain suprasegmental characteristics with multiple-word utterances and that they are therefore not single words but the first manifestation of syntax in speech. (AM)

Presents a study of young children's understanding that pronouns and proper names cannot be modified by pronominal adjectives. Some nonsyntactic theories are discussed that support the claim that children understand knowledge of word order through the rules that order abstract linguistic categories. (31 references) (GLR)

Describes a study that examines the ability of children to identify given/new elements in passive and cleft forms in order to ascertain the relationship between syntactic and pragmatic acquisition. Results indicate that complete competence with these marked sentence forms does not occur universally until some time in adolescence. (SED)

Reports on research that sought to clarify Brown's (1973) research on acquisition order, syntactic complexity, semantic complexity, and the relationship among the three. (Author/AM)

This paper reports an investigation into the acquisition of indirect object constructions by English children aged 5-10. Sentences having a prepositional "to" phrase containing the indirect object, and following the direct object, were acquired before sentences where the indirect object preceded the direct object. (CHK)

The nature of the task of defining words by means of other words and the development of language responses (from children aged four to seven) are discussed in terms of a linguistic analysis of the definitional form and its semantic relations. (Author/RM)

Examines children's errors in interpreting 'ask' as 'tell' in the framework of pragmatic development. Results indicate that if the children do not know the information, they relay the question, i.e., 'ask.' If they do know the answer, they supply it, i.e., 'tell.' (EKN)

This paper discusses C. Chomsky's 1969 paper on children's syntactic development and the subsequent studies made to test her findings. Later studies indicate that Chomsky's results were not clearly differentiated, and a slight alteration in procedure changes results significantly. (CHK)

Provides an experimental validation of Landau and Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure on how children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. The children's choice of the correct referent for a given verb versus a nonsense verb in two syntactic structures is explained. (37 references) (GLR)

The study reported here investigated the effects of using props to illustrate the meaning of sentences in a syntactic awareness task in which subjects were required to correct ungrammatical sentences. Children scored significantly higher in the props condition though the proportion of meaning-changing errors to total errors was not significantly…