What is it about?
This is an elicited production study to investigate how 2-year-old children produce negative sentences. Elicited production encourages children to try structures they might otherwise avoid in their spontaneous speech. By using this technique, we can reveal children's current grammatical hypotheses. The study elicits negative sentences for which an adult would use 'doesn't' such as 'Minnie Mouse doesn't fit'. In the same context, some 2-year-olds produce sentences such as 'Minnie Mouse not fits' or 'Minnie Mouse's not fit' in addition to 'Minnie Mouse not fit' and 'Minnie Mouse don't fit' which have been observed previously.
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Why is it important?
It is important to know the details of the stages of development in typically-developing children, so that we can use this as a foundation for providing clinical solutions for children with developmental delay in language.
Perspectives
Elicited production enables a different view of children's developing grammar from data gathered from spontaneous production contexts. Elicited production methodology encourages children to try structures they might otherwise avoid, thereby revealing their current grammatical hypotheses.
Professor Rosalind J Thornton
Macquarie University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Syntax-PF Interface in Children’s Negative Sentences, Language Acquisition, October 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10489223.2014.943901.
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