Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category

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.