One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schutze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present…

Investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Tested Valian's (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames, because they do not require a direct object argument. (Author/VWL)

Analyzed naturalistic data from 12 2- to 3-year-old children and their mothers to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition. Results suggests that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which…

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency…