This article compares children's productions of wh-questions such as "who?" or "what?". Data were gathered using the technique of elicited production. (26 references) (JL)

On the standard, neo-Gricean view, most is semantically lower bounded but may give rise to the meaning "not all" through scalar implicature (Horn (1972)). More recent proposals have claimed that most does not generate a scalar implicature but is semantically both lower and upper bounded (Ariel (2004; in press)). In this article, we investigate the…

This investigation examined the possibility that features necessary for morphology, such as person and number, are absent from the underlying grammars of specifically language-impaired children. (46 references) (JL)

Four experiments on the acquisition of binding are compared, two conducted with Italian-speaking children and two with English-speaking children. English-speaking children's mastery of pronominal binding is found to lag behind their mastery of binding for anaphors and R-expressions. (61 references) (Author/LB)

Employs a truth-value task to reexamine native-language (NL) transfer among Chinese-speaking second-language (L2) learners of English--that is, where NL or mature L2 permits verb raising. Discussion includes a comparison with the earlier findings of Eubank and Grace (1996) and analysis of developmental and transfer-based explanations for the…

A novel approach is examined for using developmental sequence data for deciding between Universal Grammar-based and problem solving models of adult nonnative grammatical development. Results support the Universal Grammar-based model of nonnative language acquisition. (19 references) (Author/LB)

We report 3 studies investigating children's and adults' interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences containing the focus-sensitive quantifier only. In each experiment, child and adult participants compared sentences with only in a preverbal position and counterpart sentences without only against a series of pictures depicting events that…

We find a general, language-independent pattern in child language acquisition in which there is a clear difference between subject and object noun phrases. On one hand, indefinite objects tend to be interpreted nonreferentially, independently of word order and across experiments and languages. On the other hand, indefinite subjects tend to be…