Adult Evaluation of Child Language. Papers from the Michigan Linguistic Society Meeting, Vol. 1, No. 2.

Analysis of adult evaluation of children's linguistic output provides a basis for elaboration upon the work of McNeill (1970) and Brown (1970). When limited to the uttered words of a child paired with an utterance spoken at an earlier time, adults cannot judge the relative age of the children making those utterances; in fact, their predictions of language maturity do not rise substantially above the level of chance. When restating what the children's deviant utterances mean in the absence of context, most adults retain the original vocabulary and word order and supply functors to make grammatical sentences appropriate to typical childhood interests; with context supplied, functors are added to produce well-formed simple sentences appropriate to the circumstances. (Author/DB)