Case and Agreement

Children’s use of case and agreement morphology offers a window into the structure of their developing grammatical systems. Children acquiring English commonly produce accusative pronouns in subject position, and use verb forms lacking agreement morphology. The systematic patterns in these errors and correlations between them have been the subject of a great deal of research over the past few decades. This chapter lays out some of the results to date and the theoretical interpretations they have led to, as well as points of debate on methodology. The discussion centers around English, with other languages considered where predictions differ, and the topics include a general overview of the relation of case and agreement, optional/root infinitives, default case, and morphological access.