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One of the remarkable feats of children acquiring a first language is the ability to create abstract patterns based on concrete utterances encountered in the input. For instance, children learn that verbs occurring in the intransitive construction (the window broke) can be extended to the transitive (causative) construction (she broke the window) and vice versa. In addition to making generalizations, children also have to learn when not to generalize (e.g., giggle can only be used in the intransitive and cannot be causativized in English, e.g. *she giggled her sister). How do children acquiring languages with different causativization strategies learn to construct abstract generalizations, and retreat from overgeneralizations? Our lab is participating in a large crosslinguistic study of sentence structure acquisition in English, Kiche Maya, Japanese, Hindi, and Hebrew in a project led by Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool) and including an international cast of researchers. More details can be found .