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.…

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…

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)

Examines a mixed pattern of subject omission in Hebrew. Longitudinal data is presented from three children whose first and only language is Hebrew. Findings show very early acquisition of the null subject system. (Author/VWL)

Summarizes claims made in three studies that adopt a morphological approach to nonnative speaker-native speaker divergence. Examines these claims in terms of the morphological and syntactic theories presupposed and points to a number of problems. (Author/VWL)

Examined children's ability to draw on functional information to predict the similarity of function across exemplars and to extend new words from an initial exemplar to one of two others. The cognitive difficulties associated with judgments concerning material function are discussed in relation to additional factors that could lead children under…

Compared the performance of participants with Williams Syndrome on two past tense elicitation tasks with that of four typically-developing control groups. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that the Williams Syndrome language system is delayed, because it developed under different constraints. (Author/VWL)

This study, involving 424 deaf secondary and postsecondary students, evaluated the interaction between vocabulary knowledge and syntax competence, finding a significantly greater correlation for students in the highest quartile of syntactic competence. It concludes that, unless deaf readers have achieved a reasonable level of syntactic competence,…

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…

Investigated adult English speakers' production of subject and object relative clause sentences using a picture/symbol-based augmentative and alternative communication (ACC) system with speech output. Most participants avoided the potential ambiguity that resulted from the absence of grammatical markers. Results indicate the combined effects of…

Presents the results of an empirical study of the interpretation of left branch "combien" (how many) extractions in English-French interlanguage. Results show that knowledge of the interpretation of left-branch "combien" extraction is detectable in English-French interlanguage. (Author/VWL)

Explores the syntactic structure, cognitive functions, pedagogical features, and communicative characteristics of questions asked by graduate students in an asynchronous learning environment. Results show students used fewer syntactic forms and asked more rhetorical questions than in face-to-face classrooms and exhibited higher levels of…

Investigated the development of syntactic awareness in Cantonese-speaking children. Fifty-six subjects from four age groups were asked to judge the grammaticality of 40 sentences and to correct the grammatically-deviant sentences. There was a significant age effect on subject's performance in both judgment and revision tasks. (Author/VWL)