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When opportunity knocks twice: two-year-olds' repetition of sentence subjects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2005

VIRGINIA VALIAN  and
STEPHANIE AUBRY
VIRGINIA VALIAN
Affiliation:
Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center
STEPHANIE AUBRY
Affiliation:
Hunter College, CUNY Graduate Center
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Abstract

Why are young children's utterances short? This elicited imitation study used a new task – double imitation – to investigate the factors that contribute to children's failure to lexicalize sentence subjects. Two-year-olds heard a triad of sentences singly and attempted to imitate each; they then again heard the same triad singly and again attempted to imitate each. Comparisons between the two attempts showed that children's second passes were more accurate than their first. In addition, independent of sentence length, children increased their inclusion of pronominal and expletive but not lexical subjects. Children included verbs more often from sentences with pronominal than lexical subjects, suggesting a trade-off. Children included subjects more often in short sentences than long ones, and increased subject inclusion only in short sentences. The results suggest that children's language production is similar to adults': a complex interaction of syntactic knowledge, limited cognitive resources, communicative goals, and conversational structure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , August 2005 , pp. 617 - 641
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (RO3MH055353) and in part by grants from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program. For their fine work, we thank the assistants and interns on the project: D. Byrne, C. Mahoney, J. Scarpa, A. Buchwald, and T. Nicol. We warmly thank the children and parents who so generously contributed their time and effort. We thank Mary C. Potter and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and discussion. We are especially grateful to Edward Klima, whose work in another domain was the inspiration for our task.