Early perception-late comprehension of grammar? The case of verbal - s: a response to de Villiers & Johnson (2007)

Abstract

Two recent papers (de Villiers & Johnson, 2007; Johnson, de Villiers & Seymour, 2005) have claimed that children have difficulty with verbal -s until five-six-years-old. This contrasts with perceptual studies showing evidence for sensitivity to the grammatical properties of verbal -s as young as 1; 4. These apparently conflicting findings can be reconciled by differentiating between early perceptual grammatical knowledge and later semantic comprehension.