1. TRANSFORMATIONAL COMPLEXITY AND SENTENCE DIFFICULTY: A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY.
- Author
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Bell, Philip
- Subjects
- *
GENERATIVE grammar , *SENTENCES (Grammar) , *GRAMMAR , *CHILDREN , *INTEREST (Psychology) , *PSYCHOLINGUISTICS - Abstract
The article presents a developmental study of transformational complexity and sentence difficulty. Two studies investigated the validity of an index of transformational complexity in predicting the difficulty of sentence recall and completion by young children. During the past decade numerous studies have investigated the development of young children's abilities to imitate and produce various types of sentences. The central theoretical interest of the research has been to evaluate the relevance of formal linguistic concepts to the explanation of how linguistic knowledge develops. Hence predictions concerning the difficulty of sentence recall by children have been frequently based on current models of transformational generative grammar.
- Published
- 1976
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