Sentence repetition in preschoolers: Effects of length, complexity, and word familiarity

Abstract

Seventy-two sentences presented to ten preschool children for repetition were designed so that three sentence construction factors varied independently. The factors were (1) length in number of words, (2) complexity of personal pronouns and main verbs as scaled by Lee (1974), and (3) word familiarity, defined as common vocabulary or the substitution of a nonsense word in place of a typical noun or verb in the model sentence. Three methods were employed for scoring the children's responses: (1) number of retained words, (2) Developmental Sentence Scoring (Lee, 1974), and (3) Stephens's Categories (Stephens, 1974). Eighteen sentences were re-presented for the assessment of reliability. The results of multiple regression analyses indicated that length was the important contributing factor in the children's responses to the model sentences and that Stephens's Category Scale of response scoring was the most sensitive method for detecting the influence of the three sentence factors on the children's responses.

Distributionally constrained items in child language: the acquisition of superweak NPI shenme ‘a/some’ in Mandarin Chinese

“…As suggested by Montgomery et al (1978), for instance, stimuli containing six to seven words are short and thus easy for children between four and six years old, whereas those containing nine to ten words are of a medium length and are more difficult for children of the same age range, and stimuli containing twelve to thirteen words are of a maximum length. The current experiment did not opt to use the maximum length of twelve to thirteen words, because otherwise the stimuli would be too difficult for the three-year-olds to comprehend, reconstruct, and produce.…”

“…As an elicited imitation task requires children to repeat pre-recorded stimuli, working memory turns out to be of crucial importance in explaining their imitation performance (Hamayan et al 1977;Montgomery et al 1978;Gallimore & Tharp 1981;Fujiki & Brinton 1983;Lust et al 1996;Eisenbeiss 2010;among others). Therefore, the length of stimuli needs to be controlled, in order to avoid children giving a repetition response from memory alone, without first establishing their own mental representation of a stimulus (e.g.…”

“…Therefore, the length of stimuli needs to be controlled, in order to avoid children giving a repetition response from memory alone, without first establishing their own mental representation of a stimulus (e.g. Montgomery et al 1978). Stimuli have to be sufficiently long to override children's memory capacity, but short enough for comprehension, because children must be able to reconstruct their own mental representations of the stimuli without omitting too many words.…”

“…An elicited imitation task is a research method that is often employed in different linguistic domains to assess acquisition by children below the age of six, such as (morpho-)syntax and semantics (Carrow 1974;Montgomery et al 1978;Scholl & Ryan 1980;Keller-Cohen 1981;Fujiki & Brinton 1987;Lust et al 1996;Panitsa 2001;among others). Van der Wal (1996), one of the first studies to address the learnability of NPIs, also employed the elicited imitation task.…”

“…Nonetheless, one may still question to what extent participants' imitation performance may be influenced by different structural complexities involved in different test conditions. Following Montgomery et al (1978), I assume that structural complexity is far less important than sentence length when explaining children's imitation performance in elicited imitation tasks.…”