This paper explores the nature of copula omission in Cypriot Greek individuals with Down Syndrome (DS). Previous studies on DS have attributed high rates of copula omission to an overall grammatical/inflectional impairment without offering further analysis. In order to identify relevant conditioning factors, we examined copula productions and…

Purpose: Child language acquisition is marked by an optional infinitive period (ages 2-4 years) during which children use nonfinite (infinitival) verb forms and finite verb forms interchangeably in grammatical contexts that require finite forms. In English, children's errors include omissions of past tense /--ed/ and 3rd-person singular /--s/.…

Purpose: To experimentally investigate knowledge of passives of actional ("hold") and psychological ("love") verbs in children with Williams syndrome (WS). Passives are usually reported to be in line with mental age in WS. However, studies usually focus on passives of actional verbs only. Method: Twenty-six children with WS, ages 6-16, and 3…

This study explored the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense in 21 children with specific language impairment. The findings support a morphosyntactic rather than morphophonological learning model, such as the extended optional infinitive model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children. (Contains…

Examined Russian-speaking children's knowledge of syntactic and discourse-related restrictions on the interpretation of pronouns in subjunctive clauses. Eighteen children (4-5 years of age) participated in a truth-value judgment task. In constructions in which syntactic knowledge is implicated, children's performance is very similar to that of…

Two studies examined the development of major properties of reflexives and pronouns in English language acquisition by applying the theory of binding of reflexives and pronouns to potential antecedents in the sentence. The children ranged in age from 2.6 to 6.6 years. In the first experiment, the children were presented with two pictures and were…

A longitudinal study of 43 typical children (ages 2 to 8) and 21 children with specific language impairments (SLI) found that a diverse set of morphemes share the property of tense marking, that acquisition shows linear and nonlinear components, and that mean length of utterance predicts rate of acquisition. (Author/CR)

Presents evidence for a theory that children learning Russian at a certain age know a syntactic principle that governs the distribution of pronouns, but that they do not know a pragmatic or semantic principle that restricts the situations in which noun phrases may be contraindexed. (Contains 48 references.) (JP)

Presents new evidence for the view that specific language impairment (SLI) involves a syntactic-feature deficit within non-evident grammar. The data involve morphological case and its interaction with verbal inflection. (Author/VWL)

Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a…

A study investigated how Chinese children and adults interpreted sentences containing universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers. The purpose was to get preliminary evidence on whether Chinese children understand scope relations and whether they know which relations are possible for particular syntactic configurations. Subjects were 192…