A universality hypothesis of language acquisition was tested. The hypothesis states that the order of acquisition of verifying four types of statements is true affirmatives (e.g., "You are a child"), false affirmatives (e.g., "You are a baby"), false negatives (e.g., "You aren't a child"), and true negatives (e.g., "You aren't a baby"). Young monolingual native speakers were asked to verify these statements. The Englishspeaking children found true negatives most difficult and the hypothesis was supported. The Japanese-speaking children, however, found false negatives most difficult, and the hypothesis was not supported. A theory of cross-linguistic language acquisition is proposed.In the past two decades, linguists and psycholinguists have observed a shift in emphasis in dealing with language universals. Previously, researchers were interested only in those language universals that are common to all languages (e.g., Greenberg, 1963) or in languageuniversal acquisition patterns that are common to all language groups (Bever, 1970;McNeill, 1966;McNeill, 1975;Slobin, 1970). Against this simplistic view, linguists are increasingly interested in more careful linguistic generalizations across languages (e.g., Greenberg, 1978;Lehmann, 1978). Developmental psycholinguists are interested in explaining different rates of acquisition in different language The study described in this article was presented at the Biannual Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, March 15-18, 1979, San Francisco, California. The verification model proposed for Japanese was developed in collaboration with Ed Shoben for an unpublished paper.The author wishes to thank Tom Bemdt and Frank Durso for their careful reading of earlier drafts and Andrea Guillory and Belinda Biscoe for their assistance in data analysis The author also wishes to thank the principals, directors, teachers, caretakers, staff, and children for their cooperation and participation in this study.
