The Relationship between Syntax Discrimination and Sentence Imitation in Children

Abstract

BOHANNON, JoHN NEL, III. The Relationship between Syntax Discrimination and Sentence Imitation in Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1975, 46, 444-451. 54 first-, second-, and fifthgrade children (9 boys and 9 girls per grade) were asked to imitate sentences that varied in terms of word order distortion (normal vs. scrambled syntax) and sentence length (5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 words). Several months later the same children were asked to discriminate between the normal and scrambled sentences. Children who discriminated word order (i.e., made less than 5 errors) imitated normal word order sentences significantly better than nondiscriminator children. The effect was powerful enough to render the normal syntax imitations of first-grade discriminator children indistinguishable from the normal syntax imitations of fifth-grade children. The data suggest an important qualitative change in the manner in which 6-7-year-old children process structured language.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.