This article clarifies the position taken in the Greenfield and Smith book (1976), including relation to speech act theory, and elucidates some general theoretical issues in early language development. (Author/NCR)

This article reviews and criticizes Fay's particular transformational descriptions as implausible. (Author/NCR)

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)

This article criticizes a previous paper that stressed a transformational analysis of children's question acquisition. It is argued that a surface structure generalization analysis makes empirically correct predictions about mistakes both in acquisition of inverted word order and in the form of "wh" questions. (CHK)

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)