Minding the Absent: Arguments for the Full Competence Hypothesis

Tense and Syntactic Processes in Agrammatic Speech

“…Results confirm that the errors differ from those made by children and that a different explanation is required. Explanations offered by Borer and Rohrbacher (1997) and by Friedmann and Grodzinsky (2000) are discussed but are considered inadequate to deal with our data. It is proposed that agrammatic speakers have problems with the implementation of grammar and particularly with syntactic processes such as feature-checking.…”

“…There is some evidence that although some young children and aphasic speakers may make similar errors, the distribution of errors is different. Borer and Rohrbacher (1997) examining published data on subject clitics in French agrammatic speakers and verb inflection in Italian agrammatic speakers claimed that the errors they observed evidenced an absence of functional projections. They proposed that the ''random'' use of agreement markers in aphasic speech indicated that although verbs are drawn fully inflected from the lexicon they cannot be checked because of the absence of functional projections.…”

Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon

“…Borer and Rohrbacher (2002) point out that children's most common morphological error is omission: morpheme substitution itself is rare. According to them, the prevalence of omission indicates that children are aware of the category, but avoid making errors when their knowledge of the morphological paradigm is incomplete.…”

Acquisition of object clitics in child Polish: Evidence for three developmental stages

“…Given that Polish children show early object clitic comprehension, as it occurs 40% of the time even in the youngest age group, it appears that children are able to calculate clitic referentiality early on. One explanation, in line with Borer and Rohrbacher's (2002) Maturation Hypothesis, involves the mechanism of D-linking in child grammar. One of its basic claims is that properties of grammar are biologically programmed and begin to emerge gradually after a certain period of development.…”

“…By comparing clitic production and clitic comprehension results, three developmental stages are identified. A maturational account is adopted attributing non-adult-like structures in child grammar to a discourse-linking mechanism (Borer and Rohrbacher, 2002). …”