This paper investigates the distribution of imperfective and perfective verb inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic. Spontaneous speech of three children (1 ; 8-3; 1) was analyzed for accuracy and error types. The results showed that the verbal inflections appeared correct almost all the time (89-97% of the time). Agreement errors appeared 3-11% of the…

Presents an analysis of past tense and participle usages by children, focusing on overapplications of irregular vowel-change patterns, as in "brang"; blends, as in "branged"; productive suffixations of "-en," as in "walken"; gross distortions, as in "mail-membled"; and double-suffixation, as in "walkeded." Findings indicate that these errors are…

Analysis of the use of the connective "but" by 3- to 9-year-olds indicated that all most commonly used the word to signal semantic relationships and for pragmatic functions. Younger children most frequently used "but" when causal or precausal relationships existed, and older children used "but" more to encode complex contrast. (Author/CB)

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 inconsistencies of personal pronoun production both in production and between production and comprehension in a pronoun-reversing child. (EKN)

Sentences evoked from three- to five-year-olds (N=16), analyzed for errors (particularly copying-without-deletion), showed errors when: the subject noun phrase (NP) contained a relative clause, the relative clause had an object gap, and the relative clause was long. (Author/CB)