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A comprehensive cognitive appraisal of elementary school children with learning disabilities showed that within the language sphere, deficits associated with reading disability are selective Phonological deficits consistently accompany reading problems whether they occur in relatively pure form or in the presence of coexisting attention deficit or arithmetic disability Although reading-disabled children were also deficient in production of morphologically related forms, this difficulty stemmed in large part from the same weakness in the phonological component that underlies reading disability In contrast, tests of syntactic knowledge did not distinguish reading-disabled children from those with other cognitive disabilities, nor from normal children after covarying for intelligence

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to account for language acquisition. At the heart of the problem is the poverty of the stimulus, which underdetermines the hypotheses that children formulate. Generative grammar proposes that the form for expressing rules is innately constrained, and one putative constraint is structuredependence. The present study subjected this proposal to an empirical test. In the first experiment, yes/no questions-amenable in principle to both structure-dependent and structure-independent analyses-were elicited from thirty 3-to 5-year-old children. A second experiment explored the nature of children's errors in Experiment 1. A third experiment contrasted a structurally-based account of the acquisition of interrogatives with one based on semantic generalization. The results of these experiments support Chomsky's contention that children unerringly hypothesize structure-dependent rules. Moreover, it was found that the rules which children invoke are formally insensitive to the semantic properties of noun phrases-a finding that supports the developmental autonomy of syntax.* Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (1971) maintains that children invariantly apply structure-dependent hypotheses in the course of language acquisition, eschewing structure-independent hypotheses even when many of the available data are consistent with hypotheses of either type. Roughly, a structure-dependent operation is one which is based on the abstract structural organizations of word sequences.1 By contrast, structure-independent operations apply to sequences of words themselves, and include operations like NEXT and CLOSEST which are contingent on linear order.2 Chomsky (1971:28) accords structure-dependence the status of an 'innate schematism applied by the mind to the data of experience'. This paper presents two experiments designed to test this claim. A third experiment focuses on the developmental autonomy of syntax, a view that contrasts sharply with the widely held belief that semantic properties of sentences emerge first in grammar for-* The second author is also affiliated with Connecticut College. Part of this research was supported by NSF Grant BNS 84-18537. We are grateful for the comments of Janet Dean Fodor, Nina Hyams, Howard Lasnik, Steven Pinker, and Yukio Otsu.' These structures are abstract in the sense that nothing marks their boundaries when we hear them. It is a common belief that syntactic boundaries are marked by intonational cues; and indeed, speakers do provide several phonetic cues which mark structural breaks when their productions are syntactically ambiguous (see Cooper & Paccia-Cooper 1980). However, these cues apparently have limited effect...

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax.

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