Modified repetition in poems elicited from young children

Attempts were made to elicit poems from 133 children between the ages of 2;3 and 6;11. Seventy-eight of the children produced 606 poems between them. Forty-five per cent of the poems contained the syntactic device of modified repetition: a substitution exercise where a grammatical frame is repeated and the substitution occurs in part of the grammatical frame. This was so despite the fact that modified repetition was not present in the examples that were used to elicit poems from the children. The frequency and types of modified repetition used by the children did not vary much with age. The question of whether children's use of modified repetition in their rhythmical poems has the function of helping them to practise grammatical forms, or whether it is simply one reflection of a general human tendency towards the use of pattern in language, is discussed.