Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T05:02:13.763Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The development of sentence planning*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Frank Wijnen
Frank Wijnen*
Affiliation:
University of Utrecht
*
University of Utrecht, Research Institute for Language and Speech (OTS), Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands E-mail: fwijnen@let.ruu.nl.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This is an exploratory case study of the relation between speech output disturbances (dysfluencies) and the development of language production processes. The data consist of transcribed weekly speech samples of a Dutch boy between 2;4 and 2;11. The period of observation captures the early phase of the transition from ‘pre-grammatical’ to grammatical language. The frequency of occurrence of dysfluencies (i.e. repetitions, revisions and incomplete phrases) shows a significant increase and a subsequent decline. Whereas in the first half of the observation period the dysfluencies are distributed relatively randomly over sentences, in the second half they tend to concentrate in function words and sentence-initial words. The decline of dysfluency rate is shown to be related to an abundant use of a few ‘syntactic frames’. It is argued that these results reflect the emergence of a component in the speech production apparatus which is specifically dedicated to serial-order planning.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 651 - 675
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research is supported by the PSYCHON foundation, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Parts of the data were presented at the workshop on ‘Erwerb und mentale Organisation des Wortschatzes’, Augsburg (F.R.G.), March 4–6, 1987. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Herma Veenhof-Haan, who contributed substantially to the transcription and analysis of the data. Thanks are due to Loekie Elbers, Willem Levelt, Marcel van den Broecke, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Piet Groeneboom's help in clarifying statistical matters is gratefully acknowledged.

References

REFERENCES

Bernstein, N. (1981). Are there constraints on childhood disfluency? Journal of Fluency Disorders 6. 341–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bjerkan, B. (1980). Word fragmentations and repetitions in the spontaneous speech of 2–6 year old children. Journal of Fluency Disorders 5. 137–48.Google Scholar
Bloodstein, O. (1974). The rules of early stuttering. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 39 379–94.Google Scholar
Bloodstein, O. & Gantwerk, B. (1967). Grammatical function in relation to stuttering in young children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 10. 786–9.Google Scholar
Bloodstein, O. & Grossman, M. (1981). Early stutterings: some aspects of their form and distribution. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24. 298–302.Google Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1982). Towards a cognitive psychology of syntax: information processing contributions to sentence formulation. Psychological Review 89. 1–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K. (1987). An effect of the accessibility of word forms on sentence structures. Journal of Memory and Language 26. 119–37.Google Scholar
Boomer, D. S. (1965). Hesitation and grammatical encoding. Language and Speech 15. 103–13.Google Scholar
Branigan, G. (1979). Some reasons why successive single word utterances are not. Journal of Child Language 6. 411–21.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973). A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bruner, J. S. (1975). The ontogenesis of speech acts. Journal of Child Language 6. 411–21.Google Scholar
Butterworth, B. (1980). Evidence from pauses in speech. In Butterworth, B. (ed.), Language production. Vol. 1. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Clark, E. V. (1977). Psychology and language. New York: Harcourt Brace Yovanovich.Google Scholar
Davis, D. M. (1939). The relation of repetition in the speech of young children to certain measures of language maturity and situational factors. Part I. Journal of Speech Disorders 4. 303–18.Google Scholar
Dell, G. S. & Reich, P. A. (1981). Stages in sentence production: an analysis of speech error data. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 20. 611–29.Google Scholar
Elbers, L. (1983). Ontwikkelingsstotteren: wat ontwikkelt? Gedrag 11. 28–43.Google Scholar
Fienberg, S. E. (1981). The analysis of cross-classified categorical data. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Fromkin, V. A. (1971). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Language 47. 27–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrett, M. F. (1975). The analysis of sentence production. In Bower, G. H. (ed.) The psychology of learning and motivation. Vol. 9. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Garrett, M. F. (1980). Levels of processing in sentence production. In Butterworth, B. (ed.), Language production. Vol. 1. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Garrett, M. F. (1982). Production of speech: observations from normal and pathological language use. In Ellis, A. W. (ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gleitman, L. R. (1981). Maturational determinants of language growth. Cognition 10. 103–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gleitman, L. R. & Wanner, E. (1982). Language acquisition: the state of the state of the art. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. New York: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics: experiments in spontaneous speech. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M. (1981). The case for semantic relations: evidence from the verbal and nonverbal domains. Journal of Child Language 8. 413–37.Google Scholar
Haberman, S. J. (1974). The analysis of frequency data. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Helmreich, H. G. & Bloodstein, O. (1973). The grammatical factor in childhood dysfluency in relation to the continuity hypothesis. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 16. 731–8.Google Scholar
Holmes, V. M. (1988). Hesitations and sentence planning. Language and Cognitive Processes 3 323–61.Google Scholar
Keenan, E. L. & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 63–99.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition 14. 41–104.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Levelt, W. J. M. & Maassen, B. (1981). Lexical search and order of mention in sentence production. In Klein, W. & Levelt, W. J. M. (eds), Crossing the boundaries in linguistics. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Maclay, H. & Osgood, C. H. (1959). Hesitation phenomena in spontaneous English speech. Word 15. 19–44.Google Scholar
Marshall, J. C. (1979). Language acquisition in a biological frame of reference. In Fletcher, P. & Carman, M. (eds), Language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
McNeill, D. (1966). Developmental psycholinguistics, in Smith, F. & Miller, G. A. (eds), The genesis of language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, L. A. (1984). Language formulation related to disfluency and stuttering. In Gregory, H. H. (ed.), Stuttering therapy: prevention and intervention with children. Memphis: Speech foundation of America.Google Scholar
Peters, A. M. (1983). The units of language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Schaerlaekens, A. M. (1973). The two-word sentence in child language development. Den Haag: Mouton.Google Scholar
Schaerlaekens, A. M. & Gillis, S. (1987). De taalverwerving van het kind: een hernieuwde orientatie op nederlandstalig onderzoek. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1987). Learning to use prepositions: a case study. Journal of Child Language 14. 79–98.Google Scholar
Verhulst-Schlichting, L. (1985). De ontwikkeling van het werkwoord: plaats, vorm, type. Interdisciplinair Tijdschrift voor Taal- en Tekstwetenschap 5. 285–8.Google Scholar
Wall, M. J., Starkweather, C. W. & Cairns, M. S. (1981). Syntactic influences on stuttering in young children. Journal of Fluency Disorders 6. 283–98.Google Scholar
Warren, H. (1986). Slips of the tongue in very young children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 15. 309–44.Google Scholar
Wexler, K. B. & Mysak, E. D. (1982). Disfluency characteristics of 2-, 4- and 6-year old males. Journal of Fluency Disorders 7. 37–46.Google Scholar
Yairi, E. (1981). Disfluencies of normally speaking two year old children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24. 490–5.Google Scholar
Yairi, E. (1982). Longitudinal studies of disfluencies in two-year-old children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 25. 155–60.Google Scholar
Yairi, E. & Clifton, N. F. (1972). Disfluent speech behavior of preschool children, high school seniors, and geriatric persons. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 15. 714–9.Google Scholar
Yairi, E. & Lewis, B. (1984). Disfluencies at the onset of stuttering. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 27. 154–9.Google Scholar