In adult English, the placement of certain non-thematic verbs (e.g., auxiliaries and the copula) in clauses and the appearance of subject-agreement inflection relate to one another. 

A critical placement criterion to locate thematic and non-thematic verbs is negation (i.e., "not," "n't"). Verbs appearing to the right of negation in adult English are thematic and never inflected while those appearing to the left of negation are non-thematic and always inflected. 

Do children learning English place thematic verbs to the left of negation? Are their thematic verbs in negated utterances ever inflected for subject agreement? To answer these questions, examine the last four files of Eve and Sarah.

Since negation is the key marker of verb placement, use a particular CHILDES command to locate all of Eve's and Sarah's negated utterances (in their last four files each). Among these negated utterances, hand-locate all utterances that 

• include thematic verbs
• include third-person subjects (to "see" agreement inflection, if any)

For each of these utterances, note two nominal characteristics--location of the thematic verb vis-a-vis negation and presence of agreement inflection.

Data file:  evesar.sav
Variables: PLACEMENT, INFLECTION 

Answer the following questions:

1. Is it legitimate to use Chi-Square on the data? Check for all four assumptions.
    
    
    
2. If necessary, check the figures for normal distribution and note any outliers.
    
    
    
3. What are the degrees of freedom?
    
    
    
4. Perform the Chi-Square; write the result below.
    
    
5. Is the result significant at p<.05?
    
    
    
6. In terms of operationalization of the variables, how informative is this CHILDES data?