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The development of sentence planning*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Frank Wijnen
Frank Wijnen*
Affiliation:
University of Utrecht
*
University of Utrecht, Research Institute for Language and Speech (OTS), Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands E-mail: fwijnen@let.ruu.nl.
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Abstract

This is an exploratory case study of the relation between speech output disturbances (dysfluencies) and the development of language production processes. The data consist of transcribed weekly speech samples of a Dutch boy between 2;4 and 2;11. The period of observation captures the early phase of the transition from ‘pre-grammatical’ to grammatical language. The frequency of occurrence of dysfluencies (i.e. repetitions, revisions and incomplete phrases) shows a significant increase and a subsequent decline. Whereas in the first half of the observation period the dysfluencies are distributed relatively randomly over sentences, in the second half they tend to concentrate in function words and sentence-initial words. The decline of dysfluency rate is shown to be related to an abundant use of a few ‘syntactic frames’. It is argued that these results reflect the emergence of a component in the speech production apparatus which is specifically dedicated to serial-order planning.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , October 1990 , pp. 651 - 675
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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Footnotes

*

This research is supported by the PSYCHON foundation, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Parts of the data were presented at the workshop on ‘Erwerb und mentale Organisation des Wortschatzes’, Augsburg (F.R.G.), March 4–6, 1987. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Herma Veenhof-Haan, who contributed substantially to the transcription and analysis of the data. Thanks are due to Loekie Elbers, Willem Levelt, Marcel van den Broecke, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Piet Groeneboom's help in clarifying statistical matters is gratefully acknowledged.

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