Linguistic complexity in late language development: reformulation of relative clauses
Linguistic complexity in late language development: reformulation of relative clauses

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on syntactic development in late language development, i.e. after the age of six, within the reformulation approach framework. Reformulation is a theoretical approach which attempts to clarify how children transform utterances they were exposed to in their language input into utterances they produce themselves. In this study the reformulation of relative clauses was observed using methodology of story retelling. A total of 90 children in three age groups: 6, 10 and 14 were included. Besides quantitative analysis, i.e. frequencies of the relative clause reformulation, qualitative analysis, regarding the type of reformulation procedures, was carried out as well. The findings indicated that children aged 10 and 14 reformulated relative clauses with a relative clause significantly more than 6–year–olds did. The same age groups also produced semantically equivalent paraphrases more often than other types of paraphrases, which indicated their improvement in the ability to interrelate semantics and syntax in the construction of relative clauses.

• Details
• Contents