When conversation is not enough: assessing infinitival complements through elicitation

Area of Science:

• Child language acquisition
• Developmental psycholinguistics
• Clinical linguistics

Background:

• Infinitival complements are early complex sentence structures crucial for school-age language development.
• Limited production of infinitival complements is observed in children with language impairments.
• Conversational analysis alone is insufficient to gauge children's knowledge of infinitival complements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe a novel story completion procedure designed to elicit infinitival complements from children.
• To assess children's comprehension and production of infinitival complements in a controlled yet naturalistic manner.
• To investigate the relationship between the form and meaning of infinitival complements in child language.

Main Methods:

• A story completion task was developed with two distinct situational contexts.
• The procedure incorporated a variety of verbs suitable for eliciting infinitival complements.
• Children's responses involved both verbal production to complete stories and subsequent acting out of the utterance's meaning.

Main Results:

• The story completion procedure effectively elicited infinitival complements from children.
• The method allowed for the examination of both the grammatical forms produced and their semantic interpretation.
• Analysis revealed insights into the relationship between the form and meaning of infinitival complements in children's language.

Conclusions:

• The described story completion procedure is a valuable tool for assessing children's knowledge of infinitival complements.
• This method provides a more comprehensive evaluation than conversational sampling alone.
• The findings support the utility of this procedure in understanding language development and impairment in children.