TY - JOUR
T1 - What children say when asked "What?"
T2 - A study of the use of syntactic knowledge
AU - Valian, Virginia
AU - Caplan, Janet Stojak
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a grant from the City University of New York Faculty Research Program to the senior author. Excerpts of earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Boston University Language Development Conference, 1976; the Psycholinguistics Circle of New York, 1976; and the New York Child Language Group, 1977. We especially thank an anonymous reviewer for careful and thoughtful criticisms and suggestions. We also thank M. C. Potter, H. H. Clark, J. Mayer, and a second anonymous reviewer for their comments, and A. M. desciora for help in collecting and scoring data. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Virginia Valian, Department of Psychology, Schermerhom Hall, Columbia University, New York, N.Y. 10027.
PY - 1979/12
Y1 - 1979/12
N2 - The present study explores two questions: What is the nature of older children's syntactic knowledge; how is that knowledge used in an everyday speech situation? Six-, eight-, and ten-year-olds repeated grammatical sentences as read by the first experimenter. Half the sentences were syntactically clear, half slightly distorted. Clear versions displayed basic grammatical relations and constituent structure perspicuously. The second experimenter, who sat at the other end of the room, asked "What?" after each sentence. The syntactic changes children might make to accommodate the listener were examined. Although the children made a variety of changes, at all ages they tended to change distorted versions to clear ones, and to repeat clear versions. The results suggest that children's syntactic knowledge is deeper and more accessible than had been supposed.
AB - The present study explores two questions: What is the nature of older children's syntactic knowledge; how is that knowledge used in an everyday speech situation? Six-, eight-, and ten-year-olds repeated grammatical sentences as read by the first experimenter. Half the sentences were syntactically clear, half slightly distorted. Clear versions displayed basic grammatical relations and constituent structure perspicuously. The second experimenter, who sat at the other end of the room, asked "What?" after each sentence. The syntactic changes children might make to accommodate the listener were examined. Although the children made a variety of changes, at all ages they tended to change distorted versions to clear ones, and to repeat clear versions. The results suggest that children's syntactic knowledge is deeper and more accessible than had been supposed.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/0018620385
U2 - 10.1016/0022-0965(79)90073-0
DO - 10.1016/0022-0965(79)90073-0
M3 - Article
C2 - 533836
AN - SCOPUS:0018620385
SN - 0022-0965
VL - 28
SP - 424
EP - 444
JO - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
JF - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
IS - 3
ER -