Research in psychology and in linguistics has converged to suggest that the syntactic frames in which verbs appear carry meanings of their own, apart from the meaning of the verbs themselves. To date, however, a gap has existed between these two lines of research: Research in psychology has inferred the meanings of frames only indirectly; research…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of deictic reference in the speech of 19 three-year-old Black children. The deictic verbs of motion are examined with reference to other aspects of the deictic system. The data for this study are approximately eight hours of spontaneous speech collected in a pre-school classroom. The hypothesis to…

From the standpoint of transformational grammar, this experimental work evaluates the extent to which children choose or fail to generalize their rules for the placement of the negative particles "not" and "n't." The subjects were eight three- and four-year-olds of middle-class background who had been producing sentences with…

The acquisition of rules for formulating causative verbs was studied with children over a period of a few years. Most of the data is based on the spontaneous speech of the author's two daughters, from age 2;6 to 6;2 and from age 2;4 to 3;11. It was hypothesized that there are at least two prerequisites for the child's formulation of a general rule…

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge and interests. Most research on linguistic input to children has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to…

Data from responses to a grammaticality judgement test by 26 learners of English as a second language at two proficiency levels were used to investigate syntactic acquisition. Four syntactic structures were examined. Results suggest that less proficient subjects use syntactic strategies, while more proficient learners use semantic-based…