Speakers are known to make subject-verb agreement errors both when a number-mismatching noun intervenes between the head of the subject phrase and the verb (e.g., "*The key to the cabinets are on the table") and in configurations in which there is a number-mismatching noun that does not intervene (e.g., "*The cabinets that the key open are on the…

Three studies investigated the comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle "only" by children and adults. Contrary to previous findings, two of the studies found that young children made errors predominantly by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to…