Purpose Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language impairment (LI). Method Twenty-five children with LI and 25 younger children serving as vocabulary controls (VC) repeated sentences whose verb inflections were masked by a cough. The verb inflections marked distinctions according to tense, person, number, and definiteness of the object. Results The children with LI were significantly less accurate than the VC children, but generally showed the same performance profile across the inflection types. The types of errors were also similar in the two groups. Conclusions Accounts that assume problems specific to agreement do not provide an explanation for the observed pattern of findings. Although the findings are generally compatible with accounts that assume processing limitations in children with LI, one such account, the morphological richness account, was not accurate in all of its predictions. One non-morphosyntactic factor -- the retention of sequences of sounds – appeared to be functionally related to inflection accuracy and may prove to be important in a language with numerous inflections such as Hungarian.

Focus sentences in Hungarian are claimed to express exhaustive identification by a syntactic-semantic operator in standard generative descriptions, but there are also arguments against this view. Our study aimed to gather empirical evidence for the exhaustive interpretation of focus sentences and to explore developmental changes with age. Two groups of children (mean ages 6;3 and 10;8 years) and a group of adults participated in a picture-sentence verification task that systematically varied sentence and context types. Adults showed a marked sensitivity for focus as a group, but focus sensitivity was not evident in either group of children. All participant groups were remarkably inconsistent in distinguishing neutral and focus sentences. In spite of the measurable sensitivity to focus in adults, the pattern of the results contradicts the predictions of the syntactic-semantic operator model concerning exhaustive interpretation, and urges further research.

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Much of the data were consistent with predictions of the morphological richness account. However, there was also evidence suggestive of differences between the language impairment and verbal control groups in their representations. In particular, the children with language impairment seemed to rely more (though not exclusively) on memorized items in the lexicon.