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Many current generativist theorists suggest that young children possess the grammatical principles of inversion required for question formation but make errors because they find it difficult to learn language-specific rules about how inversion applies. The present study analyzed longitudinal spontaneous sampled data from twelve 2-3-year-old English speaking children and the intensive diary data of 1 child (age 2;7 [years;months] to 2;11) in order to test some of these theories. The results indicated significantly different rates of error use across different auxiliaries. In particular, error rates differed across 2 forms of the same auxiliary subtype (e.g., auxiliary is vs. are), and auxiliary DO and modal auxiliaries attracted significantly higher rates of errors of inversion than other auxiliaries. The authors concluded that current generativist theories might have problems explaining the patterning of errors seen in children's questions, which might be more consistent with a constructivist account of development. However, constructivists need to devise more precise predictions in order to fully explain the acquisition of questions.

In the "blocking-and-retrieval-failure" account of overregularization (OR; G. F. Marcus, 1995; G. F. Marcus et al., 1992), the claim that a symbolic rule generates regular inflection is founded on pervasively low past tense OR rates and the lack of a substantive difference between past tense and plural OR rates. Evidence of extended periods of OR in the face of substantial correct input (M. Maratsos, 2000) and of an initial period in which nouns are more likely to be overregularized than verbs (V. A. Marchman, K. Plunkett, & J. Goodman, 1997) casts doubt on the blocking account and suggests instead an interplay between type and token frequency effects that is more consistent with usage-based approaches (e.g., J. Bybee, 1995; K. K6pcke, 1998; K. Plunkett & V. Marchman, 1993). However, previous naturalistic studies have been limited by data that account for only 1-2% of child speech. The current study reports analyses of verb and noun ORs in a dense naturalistic corpus (1 child, 2;00.12-3;11.06 [years;months.days])that captures 8-10% of child speech and input. The data show (a) a marked difference in verb and noun OR rates; (b) evidence of a relationship between relative regular/ irregular type frequencies and the onset and rate of past tense and plural ORs; (c) substantial OR periods for some verbs and nouns despite hundreds of correct tokens in child speech and input; and (d) a strong negative correlation between input token frequencies and OR rates for verbs and nouns. The implications of these findings for blocking and other accounts of OR are discussed. KEY WORDS: language acquisition, morphology, overregularization, past tense, plural, Children's acquisition of English past tense and plural inflection has provided evidence for widely differing theories of morphological representation. The debate has tended to focus on the question of whether [...]

During the early stages of language acquisition, children pass through a stage of development when they produce both finite and nonfinite verb forms in finite contexts (e.g., "it go there," "it goes there"). Theorists who assume that children operate with an abstract understanding of tense and agreement marking from the beginnings of language use tend to explain this phenomenon in terms of either performance limitations in production (e.g., V. Valian, 1991) or the optional use of finite forms in finite contexts due to a lack of knowledge that tense and agreement marking is obligatory (the optional infinitive hypothesis; K. Wexler, 1994, 1996). An alternative explanation, however, is that children's use of nonfinite forms is based on the presence of questions in the input )"Where does it go?") where the grammatical subject is immediately followed by a nonfinite verb form. To compare these explanations, 2 groups of 24 children aged between 2 years 6 months and 3 years were exposed to 6 known and 3 novel verbs produced in either declaratives or questions or in both declaratives and questions. The children were then questioned to elicit use of the verbs in either finite or nonfinite contexts. The results show that for novel verbs, the children's patterns of verb use were closely related to the patterns of verb use modeled in the language to which they were exposed. For known verbs, there were no differences in the children's use of individual verbs, regardless of the specific patterns of verb use modeled in the language they heard. The implications of these findings for theories of early verb use are discussed. KEY WORDS: language acquisition, third person singular verbs, input-driven learning, During the early stages of language acquisition, children pass through a stage of development between approximately 2 and 4 years of age when they produce both finite and nonfinite verb [...]

A general lexicalist account is needed to account for development of the verb category in children learning English. Findings of a study of children's multiword speech suggest problems for both Valian's syntactic performance limitation account and Tomasello's verb-island account. Children exhibit appropriate use of verb morphology, auxiliary verb structures, SVO word order and pronoun case marking from an early stage, but with a high degree of lexical specificity.

Cross-linguistic comparisons are crucial for determining issues related to children's acquisition of the verb category. Two issues that have recently been debated are whether noun learning is privileged over verb learning and the lexical specificity of early verb learning. English-speaking children tend to learn more object words, but this trend may not be observed in all languages. Evidence also suggests that children use conservative learning strategies.

Investigates the factors that determine the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions. Contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition; Relationship between order of acquisition and input frequency; Correlation between complexity and the frequency with which mothers use particular wh-words and verbs.

Investigates different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go. Comparison of Children's uses of the different forms of Go with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics; Predictor of the children's use of different forms of Go in particular structures and in expressing particular meanings.

Investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Difference in the ease of production of transitive and intransitive frames; Proportion of verb utterances by children who understands distinction of frames; Basis of the selection of argument structure.

Discusses the implications of widespread distributional learning of children in early language development. Lexically-based positional analysis; Development analysis; Multiword utterances; Prototypical agent-patient roles; Implications of widespread distributional learning.

Examines the link between observational and checklist measures in gauging vocabulary size and composition in children. Existing correlationship; Influence of maternal-report bias and sampling bias on the measures; Unreliability of the measures in gauging proportion of nouns in children's vocabularies; Accuracy of measurement through detailed longitudinal studies.