Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. "Marge pulled the box to Homer/*Marge pulled Homer the box"). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia have phonological deficits that are claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments and to be responsible for the overlap between the two disorders. Little is known, however, about the phonological grammar of children with SLI and dyslexia, and indeed whether they show…

Explores the predictors of early mastery versus error in children's acquisition of American Sign Language. Hypothesizes that the most frequent values for a particular parameter in prelinguistic gesture will be the most frequent in early signs and the most likely sources of substitution when children make errors. (Author/VWL)

Tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as "don't giggle me." Ninety-six children were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. Found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and preemption, but only for…

Examines different approaches to prosodic acquisition: Gerken's S(W) production template; Fikkert's and Archibald's theories of stress acquisition and Demuth and Fee's prosodic hierarchy account. Results reveal that current approaches cannot account for findings in the data such as the increased preservation of final over nonfinal unstressed…

Presents data from a positron emission tomographic study in which subjects were asked to produce the past tense forms of regular, irregular and nonce stems. Findings, which support the grammar/lexicon linguistic theories, reveal different amounts and areas of cortical activation in the regular and irregular tasks, as well as significantly…