Table 1.

Summary of overarching factors and their clinical implications for English

Factor	Implication for English
Status of bare stems	Emphasize overt tense/agreement morphology in the input when possible (e.g., She climbs rather than You climb)
	Teach how verbs later in a sentence are affected by material that appears earlier in the sentence (e.g., She likes yogurt but Does she like yogurt?)
Grammatical case	Directly contrast nominative and accusative pronouns (e.g., She sees him vs He sees her)
	Understand that the development of nominative case may be correlated with growth in using verb tense/agreement morphology (e.g., Her running is more likely to be produced than Her is running; and She’s running is more likely to be produced than Her running although all of these productions are possible).
	Teach that accusative case pronouns preceding verbs can only occur when particular verbs (e.g., help, watch, see) appear earlier in the sentence (e.g., Help me do the dishes; Let’s watch her ride the horse; I saw them fix the car).
Prosody	Teach morphemes in phonological contexts that a child can produce in monomorphemic words (e.g., a ball, the doggie if the child can already reliably produce giraffe and banana).
	Weak monosyllabic morphemes might be more accurately produced if they immediately follow a stressed syllable (e.g., cleans the… rather than kisses the…; cup of… rather than bucket of…; bus is… vs. princess is…
	Expect more accurate use of inflections when the word stem ends in an open syllable (e.g., throws rather than kicks; played rather than pushed) and when the inflected word appears in sentence-final position (e.g., Every day she runs rather than She runs really far).
Tense/aspect interactions	Consider initially teaching past tense in a telic context (e.g., She opened the door) and subsequently monitoring to ensure that the child can expend past tense to atelic contexts (e.g., She listened to music).
	If the inflection –ing is intended to reflect progressive aspect, ensure that the child can extend –ing to contexts that cannot be interpreted as marking present tense (e.g., The baby was crying as well as The baby is crying).
Canonical word order	Difficulties with a particular structure that deviates from canonical word order (e.g., wh-object questions) might signal a problem with other structures that deviate from the usual word order (e.g., passives). The difference between the two word orders might be made clear to the child using contrasts (e.g., Who was hugging the boy? vs Who was the boy hugging?).
	Structures deviating from canonical word order might be more easily understood and produced initially when there are discourse, animacy, and probable event cues supporting the correct interpretation (e.g., What is the girl painting? before Who is the girl kissing?; Here is the hat that I found in the playground before Here is the boy that the girl chased in the playground).