SRCLD Presentation Details
  Title  
       
    A Chronology for the Emergence of Complex Sentences: Pre-requisite and Co-requisite Developments  
Author(s)
Sarita Eisenberg - Montclair State University
Ling-yu Guo - Montclair State University

SRCLD Info
SRCLD Year: 2010
Presentation Type: Poster Presentation
Poster Number:
Presentation Time: (na)
Categories
- Language Acquisition
Abstract
The current study examined predictions from Limber (1973) about potential prerequisites for the emergence of complex sentences and the relative timing of modal use with first use of complex sentences. The following potential prerequisites were examined: production of four-word utterances, expansion of post-verbal noun phrases, and expansion of wh-interrogatives. Data included 6 of the Manchester corpora from the CHILDES database for which the first use of complex sentences occurred at least one month after the first recording. Only the prediction that children would produce 4-word utterances prior to first use of complex sentences was borne out. The other predictions were not confirmed. Results are considered in light of the suggestion by Diesel (2004) that early complex sentence production reflects an expansion of the simple sentence rather than embedding. Clinical implications are considered regarding the relative timing of intervention for complex sentence emergence and grammatical features of simple sentences.