Investigated children's acquisition of short- and long-distance "whose"-questions to see whether children know that, in English, the entire "whose"-phrase must pied-pipe to the specifier of complementizer. Subjects were English-speaking children, ages 4-6. phrase. (Author/VWL)

A variety of positions have been proposed to explain the ontological development of functional categories. These positions follow either a maturation or continuity perspective. This article examined the acquisition of inflectional phrase and determiner phrase in children acquiring French and English simultaneously in order to evaluate the…

Analyzes the negative utterances made by German-speaking children in transcripts of spontaneous speech. Results indicate that German-speaking children distinguish between "nicht" and "nein," using "nicht" in sentence-medial position for sentential negation and "nein" in sentence-initial position for anaphoric negation. (Author/VWL)

Examined the representation of phrase structure in early child German through the investigation of longitudinal data from seven German-speaking toddlers with respect to verb placement, verb inflection, negation, /wh/ pronouns, and complementizers. It is argued that children construct phrase-structure trees in a gradual fashion, on the basis of…

This article examines the acquisition of wh-questions and relative clauses in Sesotho, a language with no wh-movement in either questions or relatives, and in which wh-questions must be clefted. (10 references) (JL)

Evidence is presented from an experimental study with 21 children ages 4 to 5 years suggesting the coincident emergence of certain Determiner Phrases (DPs) as barriers to wh-movement and as separate binding domains. It is argued that the default assumption for children's grammar may be to assume NP is the maximal projection for a structure until a…

Discusses the suggestion that grammatical-specific language impairment (SLI) is characterized as a deficit affecting only feature-related aspects of grammar. The research reported here indicates a wider impairment involving aspects of grammar not determined by feature checking, in particular the structure of the verb phrase with resultative…