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Ties between lexical and grammatical development: evidence from early-talkers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Donna J. Thal ,
Elizabeth Bates ,
Mary Jane Zappia  and
Melinda Oroz
Donna J. Thal*
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Elizabeth Bates
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Mary Jane Zappia
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Melinda Oroz
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Communicative Disorders, San Diego State University, Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab, 6330 Alvarado Court, San Diego, CA, 92120, USA. email: thal@mail.sdsu.edu.
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Abstract

Case studies are presented for two linguistically precocious children (early-talkers) aged 1;9 and 1;5, one of whom represents a striking dissociation between vocabulary size and mean length of utterance. Each early-talker is compared to controls in the same language stage; 10 in Early Stage I (mean age 1; 7) and 10 in Stage II (mean age 2; 3). Data are explored to determine if the dissociation is best characterized as one between grammar and semantics, or a difference in cognitive style. Results showed that the child who used mostly single words produced high proportions of predicates and bound and closed class grammatical morphemes, providing no evidence of a dissociation between grammar and semantics. Results also failed to support a clear contrast between analytic and holistic processing, although partial support was found for some predictions based on cognitive style. A unifying account is proposed that considers differences in auditory short term memory, a factor which could affect the size of the linguistic unit that children can store, manipulate, and/or retrieve at a particular point in development.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 349 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported in part by NIH grants number DC00482, DC00089, GM45765, and DC01289, and by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

References

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