Misinterpretations of the logical subject of infinitives by second language learners and prelingually deaf adults are compared with children's extension of the minimal distance principle during acquisition of infinitive complement structures and other research studies. Later acquisition of certain structure is explained in terms of the sentences'…

The reversal of subject and predicate terms in quantified, categorical expressions was studied as an operation that is potentially important in issues of representation and comprehension of quantified relations. In two experiments students were asked to evaluate the relation between two quantified expressions. The salience of reversal in the…

Five experiments are carried out to determine the comprehension of passives by children. Results obtained demonstrate that comprehension rests on knowledge of syntactic structure. V - NP were interpreted as verb-object. Passives lacking a preposition were interpreted as actives. Competence in passives may be at a high level before performance is…

Human beings who have been forced to acquire language through non-auditory modalities characteristically display an impoverished syntactic system. I.M. Schlessinger (1970) has shown, for example, that users of sign language have difficulty in communicating syntactic relations such as "subject of main verb,""object of the verb," and "indirect…

Bilingual and monolingual children were presented with experimental conditions where response mode and semantic information was varied. Forty children, 20 in each language-type group, responded in the present progressive and the past tenses to a series of colored drawings of simple activities. Half of the subjects responded to the task under…