The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of verb argument complexity on verb production in individuals with aphasia using a verb-final language. The verb-argument complexity was examined by the number of arguments (1-, 2-, and 3-place) and the types of arguments (unaccusative vs. unergative comparisons). Fifteen Korean-speaking…

Research into the acquisition of L2 German word order has provided strong evidence for a sequence of incremental stages of development. Studies of the acquisition of German verb morphology so far have focused on establishing a correlation between the acquisition of word order and of verb morphology, neglecting the question how verb morphology per…

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…

Describes a study that tried to answer the following: (1) Are the passives of all actional verbs equally easy to understand? (2) Are the passives of all experiential verbs in a child's vocabulary about equally hard to understand? (3) Does comprehension of passives differ from verb to verb in a category? (SED)

Describes a study of four- to five-year-old children's interpretations of statements involving "know" (savoir) and "think" (croire). The study tried to ascertain the language operations that modify a proposition or a basic assertion and to show the speaker's attitude towards the event asserted in the statement. (SED)

Production of grammatical and lexical verbs in narratives from 29 individuals with Down syndrome and 29 controls matched on linguistic level was examined. Individuals with Down syndrome produced fewer lexical or grammatical verbs per utterance compared to the control group but produced a greater diversity of lexical verbs. (Author/CR)

The use of the verbs "go" and "come" was examined in the spontaneous speech of seven two-year-olds. As verbs of motion, the words were used in the context of describing the contour of movement rather than as means of relating end-points of a journey. This is considered crucial in explaining children's difficulty in discriminating the verbs in…

The acquisition of Spanish as a first language was investigated in a study of eight Puerto Rican children ranging in age from 17-39 months. The speech of the four children studied in Puerto Rico was analyzed in detail and compared with that of the four children taped in Boston. The children's speech was taped in natural situations and analyzed in…

Spontaneous full passives and related constructions from 234 children, aged 2 to 13, and elicited passives from 262 college students were analyzed. The agentive non-reversible did not appear until after age 9; and until age 11 no child produced both reversible and non-reversible passives. (Author/SW)

A production-based method of investigating children's understanding of deictic verbs is described. Use of "come/go" and "bring/take" by 4-7-year-olds is compared with Clark and Garnica's 1974 study. Data reveal different facts about verb acquisition processes and order. (CHK)

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…

This is a quarterly report of a project involving the analysis of the language of four Puerto Rican children living in the Boston area who are learning Spanish as a first language. The children, all male, ranged in age from 17 months to 37 months during the period of study. All had some contact with English. The data were transcriptions of…

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)