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This article investigates infant comprehension of filler-gap dependencies. Three experiments probe 15- and 20-month-olds' comprehension of two filler-gap dependencies: "wh"-questions and relative clauses. Experiment 1 shows that both age groups appear to comprehend "wh"-questions. Experiment 2 shows that only the younger infants appear to comprehend relative clauses, while Experiment 3 shows that when parsing demands are reduced, older children can comprehend them as well. We argue that this discontinuous pattern follows from an offset in the development of grammatical knowledge and the deployment mechanisms for using that knowledge in real time. Fifteen-month-olds, we argue, lack the grammatical representation of filler-gap dependencies but are able to achieve correct performance in the task by using argument structure information. Twenty-month-olds do represent filler-gap dependencies but are inefficient in deploying those representations in real time.

The business case for diversity--the practice of connecting human differences to an organization's bottom line--has been critiqued for its compromised treatment of human difference. Through a grounded in action discursive analysis of 19 interviews with diversity consultants, this research identifies three occupational demands that prompted consultants to use the business case: organizational access, motivation, and emotion work. The analysis also identifies strategies consultants used that met these demands without relying on the business case: connecting to mission statements, connecting to individual tasks, appealing to personal experience, sequencing, combining, balancing discourses of emotion and business, drawing on spiritual grounding, and using humor. By identifying these alternatives, this analysis seeks to decrease consultants' dependence on the business case when meeting occupational demands and consequently mitigate the negative effects that scholars have attributed to its common use and consequent discursive dominance in diversity work. Additionally, the conclusions suggest that diversity professionals and scholars might more explicitly use the notion of "discursive merger" to advocate for social change in organizations. (Contains 2 notes.)