Fourteen preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI) and 12 younger controls were more likely to produce auxiliary "is" to describe target pictures when the preceding sentence contained auxiliary "are" than when it contained past tense. Use of "is" was least likely when the preceding sentence was nonfinite. (Contains references.) (CR)

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…