Using the weird word order methodology (Akhtar, 1999), we investigated children's understanding of SVO word order in French, a language with less consistent argument ordering patterns than English. One hundred and twelve French children (ages 2;10 and 3;9) heard either high or low frequency verbs modelled in either SOV or VSO order (both…

Study of a one-year-old's earliest use of prepositions found that spatial oppositions ("up-down") were learned first, and used in non-prepositional senses prior to prepositional usage. "With,""by,""to,""for,""at," and "of" were learned later and used to express case relationships and more often misused and omitted than the earlier-learned…

Compared the conversations of mothers and fathers with their children, focusing special attention on breakdown-repair sentences. It was found, overall, that children and secondary caregiver fathers experienced more communicative breakdowns than did children and primary caregiver mothers. (23 references) (Author/CB)

Examined the role of animacy and pronouns as children ages 2 to 3 years acquired transitive construction. Participants learned two nonce verbs, one of which was modeled in several transitive sentence frames and the other in neutral sentence frames. Many children produced transitive sentences with the first verb, but only children near age 3…