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Children's sentence planning: Syntactic correlates of fluency variations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2009

DANA MCDANIEL ,
CECILE MCKEE  and
MERRILL F. GARRETT
DANA MCDANIEL*
Affiliation:
University of Southern Maine
CECILE MCKEE
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
MERRILL F. GARRETT
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
Address for correspondence: Dana McDaniel, University of Southern Maine – Linguistics, PO Box 9300, Portland, Maine 04104-9300, USA. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper argues for broader consideration of children's language production systems and, in that context, describes research on children's planning of syntactic structures. The research presented here measures non-fluency patterns in elicited utterances of varied syntactic type. We describe and interpret several regularities in these patterns for two groups of children (‘young’: three–five-year-olds; and ‘older’: six–eight-year-olds) and an adult comparison group. The evidence indicates a strong correspondence of adult and child responses to structural complexity, both in terms of global fluency measures and in terms of more detailed indicators of planning load. In addition, we report some specific contrasts in the patterning for children and adults that suggest disparities in processing resources and/or in local planning strategies.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 59 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

The authors wish to thank the tree spirits and the weather gods for maintaining a breathable atmosphere and bearable temperatures. We also thank research assistants Elizabeth O'Malley, Mary Ellen McAllister and Alicia Ouellette from the University of Southern Maine for help in conducting the experiment and coding the data; and Sally Olderbak from the University of Arizona EGAD Laboratory for statistical assistance. Cooperation of the children, parents, teachers and administrators of the Nathan Clifford School and of the USM Child and Family Center in Portland, Maine, is also gratefully acknowledged. Partial support for this research was provided by National Science Foundation grants BCS-0341051 and BCS-0439943.

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