A group of three-year-old children was compared to one of four-year-old children in the usage of 26 syntactic transformations on the basis of 60 utterances per child. The older group used significantly more sentence transformations per child and significantly fewer simple active declarative sentences than the younger. Among the older group 10 out…

The present article draws upon some of the data collected by the Birmingham (England) Educational Priority Area (E.P.A.) Action/Research Project in its investigation into the effectiveness of pre-school language intervention programmes. (Author/RY)

The basic-operations hypothesis predicts that for any transformation which is composed of more than one basic operation, there exists a class of errors in children's speech correctly analyzed as failure to apply one (or more) of the operations specified in the adult formulation of the rule. (Author/CTM)

From the standpoint of transformational grammar, this experimental work evaluates the extent to which children choose or fail to generalize their rules for the placement of the negative particles "not" and "n't." The subjects were eight three- and four-year-olds of middle-class background who had been producing sentences with…

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…