Production of the morpheme BE was studied among 22 children (ages 4-5) with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Contractible contexts were produced more accurately than uncontractible contexts by both groups, and there were no significant interactions between language status and contractibility. Copula forms were produced more…

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…

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…

The criteria employed in most textbooks to differentiate "ser" and "estar" followed by an adjective are mainly semantic. Most exercises offer to second language learners too high a proportion of "estar" usages, a practice that leads to overgeneralization with regard to the use of "estar." An experiment was…

This is a quarterly report of a project involving the analysis of the language of four Puerto Rican children living in the Boston area who are learning Spanish as a first language. The children, all male, ranged in age from 17 months to 37 months during the period of study. All had some contact with English. The data were transcriptions of…

Form-oriented errors of verbal inflection in speech are examined as indicators of cognitive processing in six experiments with college undergraduates. Appendices list words used as stimuli in the six experiments. (LMO)

A study was undertaken to test the theory that canonical sentence schemas can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be learned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of…

Addressed whether hierarchical relations and word order can be separated in sentence production. Assessed in two experiments whether subject-verb agreement errors require linear proximity of a so-called "local" noun to the verb. Found evidence for a stage in language production in which a syntactic structure is built prior to stage in which words…

Describes a study of how the verb-form variables of tense, aspect, mode, person, number, and stem and suffix irregularities interact for lower-level students of Spanish to determine if performance can be improved by asking students to monitor an individual variable when many of such variables must be integrated in a particular exercise. (SED)

How do English-speaking children inflect nouns for plurality and verbs for the past tense? We assess theoretical answers to this question by considering errors of omission, which occur when children produce a stem in place of its inflected counterpart (e.g., saying "dress" to refer to 5 dresses). A total of 307 children (aged 3;11-9;9)…

Spontaneous speech samples of 15 children were analyzed for appropriate and inappropriate use and nonuse of the past tense verbal inflection. It was found that: (1) two types of overgeneralization errors have acquisitional relevance; and (2) partial regularity blocks overgeneralization errors. Two hypotheses were not supported. (CHK)

Three- and four-year-old children were asked to perform a judgement task in which they chose between incorrect English transitives and intransitives and their correct adult equivalents. Purely semantic or syntactic models fail to explain the findings as well as does a model based on semantic/syntactic transitivity. (SED)

In a previous paper, J. Hurford accounts for errors in children's question forms by postulating that children incorrectly internalize adult rules. This article suggests that this rule is inconsistent and unjestified, and that such errors are due to segmentation problems and processing limitations. (CHK)

Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children have been observed to produce verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., Don't giggle me; Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Pinker, 1989). A number of recent studies have begun to find evidence that the precise distributional properties of the input may provide an important part of the explanation for…

Describes a part of a study on children's acquisition of Warlpiri, an aboriginal language spoken in central Australia, which aimed to find out at what age the children respond consistently to particular word orders and case frames for simple transitive sentences. Makes comparisons with the acquisition of Turkish transitive clauses. (SED)