The role of grammaticality in the imitation of word strings by children and adults

Abstract

The ability of Ss to imitate sentences differs significantly from their ability to imitate nonsentential word strings of equal length. This study asks about the importance of suprasegmental features and the approximation to sentencehood of the stimulus word-string for the sentential and nonsentential imitation strategies of children and adults. Citation form word strings of various types were presented to adult and child Ss, and errors in the imitations were noted and analyzed. For adults, the absence of suprasegmentals had no effect on the Ss' ability to differentially handle sentential and nonsentential sequences. For very young children (3 yr), all string types are treated similarly. Within a very short time, however, the child acquires the adult's ability to use grammatical cues for sentencehood.