The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding…

One of the central questions in speech production is how speakers decide which entity to assign to which grammatical function. According to the lexical hypothesis (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994), verbs play a key role in this process (e.g., "send" and "receive" result in different entities being assigned to the subject…

Deaf Learners' Acquisition of fundamental lexical properties of high-frequency English verbs related to transitivity and intransitivity was examined, including the subtle distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs. A 140-item sentence acceptability rating scale was used to assess this lexical knowledge in deaf college students at two…

The goal of this dissertation is to address several major empirical and theoretical issues related to English-speaking children's difficulties with auxiliary use and inversion in questions. The empirical data on English question acquisition are inconsistent due to differences in methods and techniques used. A range of proposals about the source of…

It is well known that languages differ in how they encode motion. Languages such as English use verbs that communicate the manner of motion (e.g., "slide", "skip"), while languages such as Greek regularly encode motion paths in verbs (e.g., "enter", "ascend"). Here we ask how such cross-linguistic encoding…

Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about…

The present study aims at testing the two dominant hypotheses regarding the development of inflections and other functional categories namely the "Structure-Building Model" and the "Continuity Hypothesis" within the generative theory. According to the first view, functional categories are entirely absent in children's early grammars, which contain…

This study tested the hypotheses that people had a bias for drawing agents on the left of a picture when given a verb stimulus targeting an active or passive event (e.g., "kicked" or "is kicked") and that orthographic directionality would influence the way events were illustrated. Monolingual English speakers, who read and write left-to-right, and…

Presents results of a response latency (RL) experiment with English-speaking learners of German that investigated to what extent if any two different groups of second language learners permit raising of the thematic verb. Results show that learners respond in different ways to stimulus sentences with raised and unraised verbs depending on the…

Investigates the potential interference between the grammars of French-English bilingual children, ages two to three years. The study examined their acquisition of functional categories, specifically the properties of INFL (finiteness and agreement) and negation. Results indicate that these children evidence no transfer, acceleration, or delay in…