Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often have extraordinary difficulty in the use of tense and agreement morphemes. Because spontaneous speech samples may not provide a sufficient number of obligatory contexts for these morphemes, structured probe items are often employed. However, these usually emphasize actions that can be readily…

The purpose of this research was to show how the syntactic and semantic components of the tense-aspect system interact during the acquisition process. Our methodology involved: (1) identifying predicates, (2) finding the initial occurrence of their tense-aspect morphology, and (3) observing the emergence of contrasts. Six children learning Polish…

Phonotactic probability, a measure of the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence, appears to facilitate noun learning (H. L. Storkel, 2001). Nouns and verbs, however, tend to differ in rate of acquisition, indicating that word-learning mechanisms may differ across grammatical class. The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect…

We report a cross-linguistic investigation of English-and Swedish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) in an attempt to determine whether Wexler's (1998; 2003) (Extended) Unique Checking Constraint (EUCC) can account for the grammatical profiles of these groups of children. In Study 1, a group of Swedish-speaking preschoolers…

This research investigates language-general and language-specific properties of the acquisition of argument structure. Ten French preschoolers enacted forty sentences containing motion verbs; sixteen sentences were ungrammatical in that the syntactic frame was incompatible with the standard argument structure for the verb (e.g. *"Le tigre va le…