Modification of syntactic style

Abstract

The present experiment was conducted to determine the role of appropriate modeling cues, reinforcement variables, and strong attentional responses in altering children's syntactic style. For an extremely infrequent response such as the passive construction, neither reinforcement nor modeling alone was effective in increasing the use of passives in sentences constructed by children in response to a set of simple nouns. However, children generated significantly more passives when verbal modeling cues were combined with attentional and reinforcement variables designed to increase syntactic discriminability. On the other hand, in the case of a syntactic category as common as prepositional phrases, reinforcement combined with an active attentional set increased children's usage of prepositions, but modeling cues were not a significant contributory factor. These findings indicate that syntactic responsivity which depends upon the acquisition of general rules rather than isolated responses can be accounted for in terms of social-learning principles.