Paraphrasing: Extending the data base for child language research

Abstract

This paper presents a principled method, paraphrasing, for expanding what young children actually say to what they intended to say. The technique consists of minimally restoring all deviant utterances to well-formedness, taking account of available verbal and nonverbal contextual information. The method is illustrated by application to longitudinal studies of six subjects, three initially at 18 months of age and three initially at 28 months of age. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) spread the children along a developmental continuum, which served as a baseline for comparison. MLU was significantly correlated with realised and paraphrased frequencies of several linguistic items in the children's corpora. Similar results were obtained from an association of children's linguistic development with a number of additional measures. These included coverb deletion and the complexity of linguistic context, deletion of the components of copula constructions and the relative information load of those components, pronoun deletion and information load and preposition deletion and the semantic distinctions underlying various prepositions. The results seem to justify the claim that paraphrase is a productive method for examining children's corpora of speech and the linguistic development illustrated by them.