Discusses a longitudinal study of young children's acquisition of complex sentences for expressing their beliefs about causally related events, in the transition in language development from simple to complex syntax. While most of the children's statements expressed subjective meaning overall, the acquisition of syntactic connectives was…

Describes the richness of Hollich et al.'s model of language acquisition. Presents concerns about focus on object words in word learning research, the phantom child in the model, and the missing affect in theories and research on word learning. Suggests that experimental work inspired by principles and constraints theory and observational work…

Reports a study of two- and three-year-olds' acquisition of complex sentences with perception and epistemic verbs that took a second verb in their complements. Complement types, complementizer connectives, and the discourse contexts in which complementation occurred were specific to individual matrix verbs. (Author/CB)

A group of studies on child language development between ages 2 and 3 is presented. The studies, originally published between 1970 and 1989, are the result of a longitudinal research program. An introductory section describes the contents, offers background information on several different perspectives (developmental, learnability, cross-cultural)…

A study tested the hypothesis that if, for the 2-year-old, the transitive/intransitive distinction functions to signal differences in the conceptualization of actions, the child's sentence production should show a relationship between sentence frame and (1) locus of change animacy and (2) the child's expectations concerning an action's outcome.…