Children's sentence planning: syntactic correlates of fluency variations.

This paper argues for broader consideration of children's language production systems and, in that context, describes research on children's planning of syntactic structures. The research presented here measures non-fluency patterns in elicited utterances of varied syntactic type. We describe and interpret several regularities in these patterns for two groups of children ('young': three-five-year-olds; and 'older': six-eight-year-olds) and an adult comparison group. The evidence indicates a strong correspondence of adult and child responses to structural complexity, both in terms of global fluency measures and in terms of more detailed indicators of planning load. In addition, we report some specific contrasts in the patterning for children and adults that suggest disparities in processing resources and/or in local planning strategies.

Articulation rate: effects of age, fluency, and syntactic structure

(Reportamos los hallazgos básicos sobre los efectos del índice de articulación, derivados de la investigación experimental sobre la planificación de oraciones de los niños. Los experimentos fueron diseñados para evaluar los procesos de producción con atención a las variables sintácticas, a la vez que se controlaban las variables léxicas y fonológicas. Las mediciones del índice de articulación reflejaron que: (1) los índices difirieron entre niños (de 3 a 8,11) y adultos, donde los índices de los adultos fueron considerablemente más rápidos que los de los niños; (2) los efectos de la expresión de fluidez y falta de fluidez del sujeto sobre las subseries de fluidez difirieron para adultos y niños; y (3) el patrón del índice de articulación para las oraciones de relativo y las oraciones coordinadas difirió tanto de un tipo de oraciones a otro como dentro del grupo de edad (AU)

We report basic findings on articulation rate effects derived from experimental research on children's sentence planning. The experiments were designed to evaluate production processes with attention to syntactic variables while controlling for lexical and phonological variables. Articulatory rate measures showed (1) rates differed for children (3–8.11) and adults, with adult rates significantly faster than child rates; (2) the effects of fluent and dysfluent host utterances on fluent substrings differed for adults and children; (3) rate patterns for relative clause and conjoined clause utterances differed, both from each other and across age group (AU)