The study investigates acquisition of verb inflections by four monolingual Hebrewacquiring children from middle-class backgrounds, audio-recorded in longitudinal, weekly samples at a mean age-range of between 18 and 26 months. Productive use of inflectional morphology is shown to manifest increasing structural specification, as a function of children's developing knowledge of morphology-syntax interfaces illustrated by Subject-Verb agreement. The verbs used by all four children evolve from nonspecified stem-like forms via sporadic structural alternations to initial productivity in the use of largely under-specified inflected forms. This process of increasing structural specification is interpreted as reflecting paradigmatic/syntagmatic interfacings in developing grammatical productivity, such that eventually a full range of inflectional contrasts is manifested in all and only appropriate syntactic environments.

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The study characterizes developmental trends in early Hebrew clause-combining (CC) by analyzing the interplay between linguistic form and communicative function in different interactional settings. Analysis applied to all utterances produced by three children aged 2; 0-3 ;0 who combined two or more clauses, either self-initiated or on the basis of adult input. Ten types of CC were analyzed for marking by connectives (e.g., the Hebrew equivalents of 'and', 'that', 'so'). Four shared consecutive developmental phases emerged: non-marking; partial marking by 'and' and 'that'; use of 'but' and 'because', favored significantly in interlocutor-supported contexts; marking of adverbial relations and more varied use of še- 'that'. These CC processes are interpreted as reflecting general properties of language development, in the form of gradually increasing specification of form-function relations under the impact of interlocutor-child interactive support combined with Hebrew-particular typological factors.

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This study aimed to detect patterns in clause construction structural changes produced by four participants aged 9;5 to 13;7 (years;months) with motor speech disorders who use speechgenerating devices. Sequences of adult-child interactions, drawn from the data of a larger study focused on enhancing vocabulary and grammar skills (Soto & Clarke, 2017), were examined. This current study comprises a secondary analysis of a corpus of 29 conversations totaling 808.36 min, analyzing clause structures by type, linguistic complexity, and intensity of adult prompts (number of turns). Results show that, over time, the participants' clause structure complexity increased through addition of phrase-internal elements such as inflections, articles, and prepositions. Use of specific grammatical elements followed the developmental stages observed in children with typical development (Brown, 1973). For all participants, the personal pronoun I (first-person singular) emerged before she, he (third-person singular), and we or they (plural). Participants with the highest number of adult-child co-constructed clauses also had the highest number of well-formed clauses. The intensity of adult prompts increased as clause structures became more complex and as participants needed more support. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.