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Language input and child syntax.

Janellen Huttenlocher1, Marina Vasilyeva, Elina Cymerman

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. hutt@uchicago.edu

Cognitive Psychology
|December 14, 2002
PubMed
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Children show individual differences in later syntactic development, with more complex sentence structures linked to richer language input from parents and teachers. This highlights the role of environmental factors in language acquisition.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Child Language Acquisition

Background:

  • Existing research on syntactic development primarily focuses on early stages and commonalities.
  • Less attention has been given to individual differences in later syntactic development and their environmental influences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate individual differences in later syntactic development among children.
  • To explore the relationship between these individual differences and variations in language input from parents and teachers.

Main Methods:

  • Study 1: Examined individual differences in children's use of multiclause sentences and noun phrases, correlating these with parent speech complexity.
  • Study 2: Assessed syntactic growth over one year in preschool settings, comparing classes with varying levels of teacher speech complexity.

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Main Results:

  • Significant individual differences were observed in children's mastery of complex sentence structures (multiclause sentences, noun phrases).
  • These differences strongly correlated with the proportion of complex sentences and noun phrases present in parental speech.
  • Children in preschool classes with more syntactically complex teacher speech exhibited greater syntactic growth.

Conclusions:

  • Later syntactic development is characterized by significant individual variation.
  • Language input, particularly the syntactic complexity of speech from parents and teachers, plays a crucial role in shaping individual differences in children's syntactic development.
  • Findings suggest environmental factors are key sources of variation in advanced language acquisition.