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Children's production of verb-phrase anaphora in a spoken task*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2008

MORAG L. DONALDSON  and
LYNN S. M. COOPER
MORAG L. DONALDSON*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
LYNN S. M. COOPER
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Address for correspondence: Dr M. L. Donaldson, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK. e-mail: Morag.Donaldson@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

To investigate the influence of semantic/pragmatic variables on children's production of verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), a spoken sentence completion task (e.g. John is throwing a ball and … Mary is too) was administered to four-, seven- and ten-year-olds. The frequency of VPA production was affected by whether the two clauses had the same or different polarity and by whether the actions were portrayed as simultaneous or sequential. These effects interacted in complex ways with age and with the presentation order of the polarity types. We speculate that developmental changes in the influence of semantic/pragmatic factors may be linked to increases with age in the strength of syntactic priming effects.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , March 2009 , pp. 449 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant to both authors from the Economic and Social Research Council (reference number 000233191). We thank the children, parents and staff of Balgreen Nursery School and Balgreen Primary School, Edinburgh for their participation and cooperation. We are grateful to Holly Branigan, Peter Caryl, Robert Logie and Julia Simner for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

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