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

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.