Children acquiring French elaborate their early verb constructions by adding adjacent morphemes incrementally at the left edge of core verbs. This hypothesis was tested with 2657 verb uses from four children between 1;3 and 2;7. Consistent with the Adjacency Hypothesis, children added clitic subjects frst only to present tense forms (as in…

Purpose: Our purpose was to test the competing sources of input (CSI) hypothesis by evaluating an intervention based on its principles. This hypothesis proposes that children's use of main verbs without tense is the result of their treating certain sentence types in the input (e.g., "Was 'she laughing'?") as models for declaratives…

Two experiments examined Czech children's comprehension of grammatical number marking in verbs. Children were presented with picture pairs involving one or multiple participants in the same action, and were asked to point to the picture described by a recorded sentence. Experiment 1 (N = 72, age 3;0-4;7) tested four types of sentences, some of…

Evidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently,…

Young monolingual children typically demonstrate frequent tense shifting during narrative development, whereas older children maintain a consistent narration tense. Therefore, inconsistent tense usage in older children could be an indication of overall limited language skills. However, information regarding tense use in bilinguals has been…

This article examines the acquisition of Korean imperfective markers, the progressive "-ko iss-" and the resultative "-a iss-," with a view to understanding how tense/aspect morphology expands beyond prototype associations with inherent aspects of the verbs. We hypothesized that "-a iss-" will develop later than "-ko iss-," but that the…

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…

According to the aspect hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000), perfective morphology emerges before imperfective morphology, it is first used in telic predicates (achievements and accomplishments) and it later extends to atelic predicates (activities and states). The opposite development is hypothesized for imperfective…

In written French, the acquisition of the nominal plural ("-s") occurs earlier and faster than the acquisition of the verbal plural ("-nt") (Totereau, Thevenin & Fayol, 1997, "Learning to Spell"). The reasons for this difference are not well known. The objective of the present research is to test two alternative hypotheses, which may provide an…

The aim of this article is two-fold: to test the Aspect Hypothesis, according to which the early use of tense-aspect morphology patterns by semantic/aspectual features of verbs, and Tense is initially defective (e.g. Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Bloom et al., 1980; Andersen and Shirai, 1994; 1996; Robison, 1995; Shirai and Andersen, 1995;…