Examines the earliest uses of verbal morphology in Spanish, an inflectional language. Stringent criteria were applied to data from two children to determine what inflections are used productively. Analyses reveal that there is little productive command of verbal morphology at early ages, and that subjects begin with a single form per verb.…

This study evaluated the ability of 21 children (ages 5 and 6) with specific language impairment (SLI) to use verbs which can alternate between transitive and intransitive contexts to indicate or relinquish cause. SLI children were proficient in lexically alternating verbs, yet provided fewer passive and periphrastic constructions and more…

Describes the cornerstone of traditional descriptive grammars as the construction (a recurrent patterns of linguistic elements that serves a communicative function), examining argument structure constructions, verbs and constructions, and implications for studying language development. Discusses Adele Goldberg's recent book, which develops the…

Presents the responses of 12 authors to Michael Tomasello's essay, which comments on Adele Goldberg's recent book, "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure." Goldberg's book develops the theory of construction grammar for a set of problems associated with verb-argument structure. (SM)

Responds to 12 commentators who commented on an essay by the author about Adele Goldberg's recent book, "Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure," which develops the theory of construction grammar for a set of problems associated with verb-argument structure. (SM)

Fifty-seven children (ages 5-8) with and without specific language impairment (SLI) participated in judgment and elicitation tasks designed to evaluate their understanding of irregular verb forms. Differences between SLI and control children were observed in their productions and relative levels of sensitivity to infinitive errors in finite…

Discusses the bare-noun phrase (NP) complementation pattern of the Spanish verb "tener" (have). Shows that the maximality of the complement NP is dependent upon three factors: (1) idiosyncratic valence requirements; (2) encyclopedic knowledge related to possession; and (3) contextualized semantic construal. (Author/VWL)

Evaluates the input-processing, deficit/single system and the grammar-specific deficit/dual system models to account for past tense formation in impaired and normal language development. Investigated regular and irregular past tense formation of 60 real and novel regular and irregular verbs in grammatical specifically language impaired (G)-SLI…

Reviews book on the current state of psychological semantics for researchers in language development. Notes points of agreement among contributors, including: study of semantics has been too oriented toward substance nouns; assigning novel words to real objects or events is more difficult using verbs than nouns; and syntax is more integrally…

Examines pragmatic factors that bias English-speaking children to produce more of the nouns and fewer of the verbs than they know. Data from 44 parent-child dyads in the New England directory of the CHILDES data base were analyzed. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments examined toddlers' ability to use cues to infer meaning of novel action words. Toddlers were taught labels for similar or dissimilar pairs of videotaped actions, with behavioral cues or eye gaze related to agents' intentions distinguishing similar events. Results showed that in year 2, children begin to consider…

Variation in the past-tense model of the verb "be" is widespread amongst English dialects, and is often considered to be the result of analogical levelling. Through an analysis of non-standard "was" in buckie English, a variety spoken in a small fishing town in northeast Scotland, this article shows that the historical record…

Raises questions regarding the classification system Darwin and Gray offer for phrasal verbs on the basis of utility in the classroom. Darwin and Gray clarify the purpose of their classification system and provide additional corpus-based data. (Author/VWL)

Investigated Icelandic and Norwegian children's knowledge of the past tense of verbs. Researchers systematically manipulated verb characteristics (type frequency, token frequency, and phonological coherence). These factors played an important role in the acquisition of the two languages. The predominant source of errors in children shifted during…

This addendum to an article that appeared in an earlier issue of this journal that described how a group of 89 brain-damaged subjects performed on a battery of tests that evaluate different kinds of verb knowledge and processing reports new statistical analyses that shed light on a complex set of findings presented in the original article.…