SGER: Children's Syntactic Planning

University Of Southern Maine, Portland ME

Investigators

Abstract

This exploratory psycholinguistic research will focus on the developing production system in 3- to 8-year-old children with an emphasis on relative clauses; it also includes comparisons with adults. Previous research shows that children as young as 3 correctly encode relative clauses, but production of different types of relative clauses reveals variation in children's control of associated production processes. Two experiments will be used to consider how planning processes contribute to that variation. Experiment 1 will use a production task in which the participant describes for a blindfolded experimenter a toy that was used in a story. Utterances will be digitally recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed to see where production difficulties -- errors, pauses, and repairs -- occur. These production difficulties may reflect underlying planning efforts. Experiment 2 will develop a new method for eliciting relative clauses, combining a priming task for adults with an elicitation task for children. Participants will observe narrated and animated stories on a computer and then answer questions. This research has implications for models of language production, through its explorations of how a developing performance system interacts with the knowledge that the system operates on. It will also enable language acquisitionists to better distinguish the effects of this dynamic system from effects of grammatical and lexical knowledge. This has implications across domains of cognitive development, where research often relies on children's speech. Children's speech is also crucial in many applied ways, for example, in the court system, in resolving interpersonal conflict, and school readiness. Better understanding of the multiple and interacting influences on early production is therefore important. Finally, the project will provide research opportunities for undergraduates in Maine and build the research capacity of the University of Southern Maine.