Young children's productivity with word order and verb morphology

Four studies examined English-speaking children's productivity with word order and verb morphology. Two- and 3-year-olds were taught novel transitive verbs with experimentally controlled argument structures. The younger children neither used nor comprehended word order with these verbs; older children comprehended and used word order correctly to mark agents and patients of the novel verbs. Children as young as 2 years 1 month added -ing but not -ed to verb stems; older children were productive with both inflections. These studies demonstrate that the present progressive inflection is used productively before the regular past tense marker and suggest that productivity with word order may be independent of developments in verb morphology. The findings are discussed in terms of M. Tomasello's (1992a) Verb Island hypothesis and M. Rispoli's (1991) notion of the mosaic acquisition of grammatical relations.