Young English-speaking children often produce utterances with missing 3sg -s (e.g., *He play). Since the mid 1990s, such errors have tended to be treated as Optional Infinitive (OI) errors, in which the verb is a non-finite form (e.g., Wexler, 1998; Legate & Yang, 2007). The present article reports the results of a cross-sectional…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

In our recent paper, "Semantic generality, input frequency and the acquisition of syntax" ("Journal of Child Language" 31, 61-99), we presented data from two-year-old children to examine the question of whether the semantic generality of verbs contributed to their ease and stage of acquisition over and above the effects of their typically high…

In the current debate about the abstractness of children's early grammatical knowledge, Tomasello & Abbott-Smith (2002) have suggested that children might first develop "weak" or "partial" representations of abstract syntactic structures. This paper attempts to characterize these structures by comparing the development of constructions around…

One of the most influential recent accounts of pronoun case-marking errors in young children's speech is Schutze & Wexler's (1996) Agreement/Tense Omission Model (ATOM). The ATOM predicts that the rate of agreeing verbs with non-nominative subjects will be so low that such errors can be reasonably disregarded as noise in the data. The present…

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency…

Analyzed naturalistic data from 12 2- to 3-year-old children and their mothers to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition. Results suggests that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which…

Responds to a critique of an earlier article. Reexamines the pattern of inversion and universion in Adam's (1973) wh-question data and argues that the Role and Reference grammar explanation put forth cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain. (Author/VWL)

Many recent generativist models attribute grammatical knowledge to young children on the basis that children's language patterns the same way as the target adult language. It has been proposed that the child acquires this knowledge early on in development by a process of parameter setting. Wexler (1996) presents the "Very Early Parameter Setting…

Investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Tested Valian's (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames, because they do not require a direct object argument. (Author/VWL)

Analyzed correct wh-question production and subject-auxiliary inversion errors in one child's wh-question data. Argues that two current movement rule accounts cannot explain patterning of early wh-questions. Data can be explained by the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and inversion and universion…

A study of subject-verb agreement in 3-year-old speakers of Brazilian Portuguese found an overall low error rate, but with important contrasts in both frequency of production of different verb inflections and rate of agreement errors associated with them, suggesting subject-verb agreement is acquired piecemeal and the learning of particular verb…

Investigates the relationship between observational and checklist measures of vocabulary composition in preschool children. Results indicate that while the two measures are correlated, there are systematic quantitative differences between them, reflecting a combination of checklist, maternal-report and observational sampling biases. (22…

This study assessed the relative merits of adult-like syntactic and limited scope formula accounts of children's early determiner use to evaluate the claim that children can be said to be operating with a syntactic determiner category early in development. The study focuses specifically on Valian's (1986) criteria for attributing the syntactic…

Examines the relationship between maternal-report measures of referential vocabulary and observational measures of referential vocabulary and usage in 8 first-born middle-class children at 50 and 100 words. Results indicate that, although this measure can be reasonably reliable, such measures tend to exaggerate the relative importance of common…