REANALYZING ROTE-LEARNED PHRASES - INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN THE TRANSITION TO MULTI-WORD SPEECH

The present study investigates the possibility that the previously doc umented relationship between referential-expressive and nominal-pronom inal styles (Nelson, 1975) may be best explained not so much in terms of 'object-orientation' or 'noun-preference', as in terms of the direc tion from which different children break into structure, with some chi ldren tending to construct patterns by combining two or more items fro m their single-word vocabularies and others tending to develop pattern s by gaining productive control over 'slots' in previously unanalysed phrases. In order to do so it makes use of a methodology for distingui shing between productive and unanalysed multi-word speech proposed in Lieven, Pine & Dresner-Barnes (1992) which is applied to observational and maternal-report data from a longitudinal study of seven children between the ages of 0;II and I;8. The results suggest not only that va riation in children's early word combinations can indeed be explained in terms of different routes to multi-word speech, but also that, far from being atypical, a strategy involving the breaking down of origina lly unanalysed phrases may be used by all children, though to varying degrees.