It has long been known that children may use a particular grammatical morpheme inconsistently at early stages of acquisition. Although this has often been thought to be evidence of incomplete syntactic representations, there is now a large body of crosslinguistic evidence showing that much of this early within-speaker variability is due to still…

Children's frequency of stuttering can be affected by utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical content of language. Using a unique small-scale within-subjects design, this study explored whether language samples that contain more stuttering have (a) longer, (b) syntactically more complex, and (c) lexically more diverse utterances than…

The present longitudinal study examines the role of caregiver speech in language development, especially syntactic development, using 47 parent-child pairs of diverse SES background from 14 to 46 months. We assess the diversity (variety) of words and syntactic structures produced by caregivers and children. We use lagged correlations to examine…

Criticism of much of the previous research into the syntax of children's language. (RD)

Existing work on the acquisition of syntax has been concerned mainly with the early stages of syntactic development. In the present study we examine later syntactic development in children. Also, existing work has focused on commonalities in the emergence of syntax. Here we explore individual differences among children and their relation to…

Recurrence analysis is introduced as a means to investigate syntactic coordination between child and caregiver. Three CHILDES ( MacWhinney, 2000) corpora are analyzed and demonstrate coordination between children and their caregivers in terms of word-class n-gram sequences. Results further indicate that trade-offs in leading or following this…

Describes the presence of a phonological selection strategy and consonant harmony rule in one child's developing phonological system. Evidence suggests that this constant harmony constraint operated across morpheme boundaries, causing a delay in the onset of two-word utterances and influencing the selection of words that could occur in word…

A study designed to investigate to what extent ethno-linguistic background affects speech patterns and syntactic flexibility of grades one, four and six children from monolingual, bilingual-French and bilingual-German rural communities. A total of 216 randomly selected subjects were used; they were selected from nine rural Manitoba schools, and…