Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., "Fred blicked the dog a stick") as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., "Fred blicked a stick to the dog"). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the…

We still know surprisingly little about how grammatical structures are selected for use in sentence production. A major debate concerns whether structural selection is competitive or noncompetitive. Competitive accounts propose that alternative structures or structural components actively suppress one another's activation until one option reaches…

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…

Discusses the complement and predicate (or adjunct) short clauses (SCs) in active transitive verb structures. Published Spanish literature is reviewed and evaluated, Spanish SC surface structure (SS) is described, an argument is presented against SS restructuring in Spanish, and analyses of several hypotheses are provided. (GLR)

Explores several aspects of Spanish mood use within the single dialect area of the Texas-Mexico border that exhibits two slightly different varieties of Spanish. Findings reveal an overwhelming variability in mood use in every example studied on both sides of the border. Age does not play any role in mood selection for either group. Other findings…

This paper begins with a literature review of research on syntactic maturity, defined as the developmental stages from one- and two-word utterances to the hierarchical structures of adult speech, and seeks to answer questions in the context of past and current research in this area. It attempts to study some of the ramifications of the movement…

Investigates the availability of syntactic cues to verb meaning. In Experiments 1-3, adult subjects' judgments of verbs' semantic similarity were compared with other adults' judgments about the syntactic properties of the same verbs. In Experiment 4, subjects paraphrased sentences formed by pairing verbs with unaccustomed sentence frames. (54…