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Journal of Child Language (2001), 28 : 507-515 Cambridge University Press
Copyright © 2001 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0305000901004731
Published online by Cambridge University Press 25 Jun 2001
 

NOTE

Productive inventory and case/agreement contingencies: a methodological note on Rispoli (1999) 1

CARSON T. SCHÜTZE a1c1
a1 UCLA

Abstract

Rispoli (1999) suggests that previous studies arguing for a contingency between the case of subject pronouns and the presence/absence of verbal agreement in the acquisition of English (e.g. Schütze, 1997) suffer from methodological problems, and presents new data that fail to support earlier findings. I show that Rispoli's methodology unnecessarily biases his study against finding the predicted contingencies: it fails to take account of children's productive lexical inventory of pronoun forms. As a result, syntactic versus morphological sources of error fail to be distinguished. I explain why this distinction is crucial within the AGR/Tense Omission Model, and clarify its predictions.

(Received November 4 1999)
(Revised July 18 2000)


Correspondence:
c1 Address for correspondence: Carson T. Schütze, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951543, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1543, USA. e-mail: cschutze@ucla.edu; fax: (310) 206–5743.

Footnotes

1 I thank two anonymous reviewers and Elena Lieven for their comments on a previous version of this paper. This work was supported by a UCLA Academic Senate grant.


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