ABSTRACT
The former type of constraint is referred to as negative evidence. It is a central assumption of learnability theory that children do not receive negative evidence. That is, parents do not reliably or frequently correct ungrammatical sentences. A recent series of articles has suggested that these parental recasts provide negative evidence. Of interest in the current study was whether children differentially imitated the new grammatical morpheme information depending on the discourse form the parent used to model it. Child responds to the maternal utterance but does not imitate the mother’s grammatical morpheme or repeat his or her original sentence. The current study’s use of imitation as a measure of the effectiveness of recasts in grammatical morpheme acquisition might be questioned. This chapter demonstrates that children are more likely to imitate the grammatical morpheme information contained in corrective recasts than in other forms of parental discourse.
