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…

Two experiments showed two-year-olds pairs of videotaped actions, one familiar and one novel, and asked them to select referents of novel verbs. For actions not involving objects, children tended to select the novel action over the familiar one in each of four experiments. For actions involving objects, novel actions were chosen more often than…

Preliminary version of this article presented at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 1971. Research and preparation of the paper supported in part by an Intramural Grant from the Regents of the University of California to T. Kenney. (VM)

This study aimed to determine the average ages at which children imitate, produce and comprehend passive constructions. Previous findings that imitation precedes comprehension, which precedes production, are confirmed in this study for children aged 3-8. (CHK)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

A study of two year olds investigated the nature and development of children's early productivity with verb-argument structure and verb morphology. Results indicated that the children showed no signs of productive verb morphology, but they did use newly learned verbs in some creative ways involving nounlike uses and the appending of locatives.…

A study of data on Japanese children shows that the development of verbs occurs at the same time as the development of nouns and may even precede it. The subjects for the study were two children who were learning Japanese as their first language. Four speech samples, taken between the ages of 22 and 28 months, were audiotaped and supplemented by…

Command of transitivity permutations in Hebrew, where a change in verb-argument syntax entails a change in verb morphology, were examined in 30 children aged 2, 3, and 8. Findings have implications for the development of derivational morphology, item-based versus class-based learning, and the impact of lexical productivity and language-particular…

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…

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

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…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

Examined the extent to which maternal linguistic input enabled children to use syntactic bootstrapping. Studied uses of 25 common verbs in speech of 57 mothers to their 1-year olds and 2-year olds. Found that verbs can be used to create informative syntactic frames, syntactic frames can cue appropriate verb class, and multiple syntactic framing…

An analysis of part-of-speech membership was made utilizing certain mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the nature of word classes. It was proposed that words of the same form class constitute "verbal habit families" on the basis of either a common grammatical meaning response, a common affix, or a common label (e.g., "verb"). One…

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…