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)

A group of studies on child language development between ages 2 and 3 is presented. The studies, originally published between 1970 and 1989, are the result of a longitudinal research program. An introductory section describes the contents, offers background information on several different perspectives (developmental, learnability, cross-cultural)…

A study tested the hypothesis that if, for the 2-year-old, the transitive/intransitive distinction functions to signal differences in the conceptualization of actions, the child's sentence production should show a relationship between sentence frame and (1) locus of change animacy and (2) the child's expectations concerning an action's outcome.…