Factors associated with the presence or absence of imaginary companions in 222 preschool children were investigated using a self-administered questionnaire completed by their parents. Section I of the Imaginary Companion Questionnaire was designed to elicit a variety of demographic data on the children and their families and was completed by all parents. Section II was devised to obtain data concerning the imaginary companion itself and was completed only by parents of those children (N -63) who currently or in the recent past had imaginary companions. Data on family structure, play activities, and personality characteristics of the children, as well as characteristics of their imaginary companions, were presented. Data from the present study indicate that reducing loneliness is one of the multiple functions served by imaginary companions.

While all of the Scandinavian languages have verb-second order in main clauses, they vary in the word order in subordinate clauses: in Icelandic the finite verb appears in a high position, to the left of negation and sentence-medial adverbs, while in all of the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages it remains in a low position, to the right of these elements. This order in Mainland Scandinavian is known to be the result of a historical change, and has frequently been tied to the loss of agreement morphology. Faroese has been argued to be currently undergoing a change of the same type, but it has proved difficult to establish a sound empirical footing for the various claims about the syntax of this language. In this article we present data from three experimental investigations of acceptability, supplemented with a study of available texts, that show that the language is very close to completing the change in the loss of the high position for the verb, but that its syntax is still distinct in this respect from that of Danish, the mainland Scandinavian language with which it is in most contact. In addition to establishing a firmer empirical basis for theories of verb movement, our study also makes the methodological point that grammaticality-judgment tasks can yield extremely fine-grained results even in cases where variability is at issue.

Faroese is at the tail-end of a change from an Icelandic-type syntax in which V-toT is obligatory to a Danish-type system in which this movement is impossible. While the older word order is very rarely produced by adult Faroese speakers, there is evidence that this order is still marginally present in the adult grammar and thus only dispreferred, rather than completely ungrammatical. Here the results are presented of an experimental study of older Faroese children: 5-year old children both accept and produce the older word order, 6 year olds do so significantly less, and 10 year olds behave like adult speakers. We discuss a number of possible interpretations of the children's variability in the context of residual effects of diachronic change in Faroese.

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