A study was undertaken to test the theory that canonical sentence schemas can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be learned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of…

Investigated the actionality effect in 48 French-speaking children (ages 5;0 to 7;11) by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depended on the type of task used to assess…

This study explores the spontaneous acquisition of Italian inflectional morphology by three children. Longitudinal, free speech samples are examined, focusing on the development of the morphological paradigms of Italian verbs, pronouns, and articles. (80 references) (JL)

To test hypothesis that young children may be open to learning non-SVO structures with novel transitive verbs, 12 children in each of three age groups (2-year olds, 3-year olds, and 4-year olds) were taught novel verbs, one in each of three sentence positions: medial, final, and initial. Results suggest English-speaking children's acquisition of a…

Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the…

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…

Properties of the input, such as raw frequency and syntactic diversity, have been shown to play a role, to different extents, in the acquisition of nouns and verbs. This study investigated the relationship between three properties of the input (input frequency, syntactic diversity, and variety in noun-type co-occurrence) and age of acquisition of…

The progressive inflection "-ing" appears to be the earliest verb inflection acquired by children learning English as their first language. Explanations are made on why the progressive is rarely, if ever, overgeneralized to inappropriate forms. (SW)

Investigates the development of past tense expressions in the speech of children from 1.6 to 2.6. It is shown that this development depends crucially on the child's cognitive construction of the time dimension, as described by Piaget. (Author/RM)

Reports a study of two- and three-year-olds' acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that took a second verb in their complements. Complement types, complementizer connectives, and the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. (Author/CB)

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

Twenty-two Spanish-speaking children ages 3 to 6 years participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce subjunctive relative clauses related to their ability to pass a false-belief task. Results indicated a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative…

Investigates structural and pragmatic aspects of caregiver input in English and Korean that relate to the early development of nouns and verbs. Twenty mothers in each language were asked to interact with their children in two contexts: Book-reading and toy-play. Data suggest that systematic comparisons of caregiver input within and across…

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs "dovere" (must) and "potere" (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two…

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…