Introduction

Abstract

“Mommy, get it ladder.” Most adult speakers of English have little difficulty understanding utterances such as this one, produced by a 2 1/2-year-old. Yet most would also agree that there is something wrong with the utterance, that it is not a well-formed sentence of English. As linguists have been pointing out for some time, the knowledge that mature speakers of a language possess permits them not only to produce and understand utterances in that language but, in addition, to reflect upon and evaluate those utterances. This sort of reflection and evaluation has generally been referred to as involving “linguistic intuitions.”