Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008, 2013) proposes that acquiring properties of the functional morphology is the most challenging part of learning a second language. In the experiment presented here, the predictions of this hypothesis are tested in the second language (L2) English of Norwegian native speakers. Two constructions are…

The "Given-before-New" principle has been identified as one of the strongest pragmatic principles governing how information is organized in adult grammar (Clark & Clark 1977; Gundel 1988). The question of whether child grammars organize information in the same way is as yet unresolved. We address this question by considering the…

It has been observed that persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CDCS) have poor language production. However, very few studies have addressed the question whether all aspects of language production are equally afflicted, or whether there are differences between for instance phonological and morphological abilities. The present study was aimed at…

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…