Sentence Diversity in Early Language Development: Recommendations for Target Selection and Progress Monitoring

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5895976.

Individual and Developmental Differences in Distributional Learning

“…One example of a treatment approach that does this can be found in Hadley and colleagues' work on unique syntactic types. They have suggested that focusing on training a variety of sentence subjects and a variety of predicates may both diversify the syntactic frames that children use and improve grammatical morpheme accuracy (Hadley, McKenna, & Rispoli, 2018;Hadley, Rispoli, & Holt, 2017). Focusing on the category of sentence subject rather than the nonadjacent dependencies associated with agreement marking may capitalize on children's ability to use distributional learning.…”

The Sequential Unfolding of First Phase Syntax: Tutorial and Applications to Development

“…Measuring progress should focus on diversity (Hadley et al, 2018). Because the internal argument (subject of intransitive, object of transitive) is a constant throughout the hierarchy of FPS structures, measuring the diversity of the internal argument makes sense.…”

“…The analytic approach is based on the position that the strength of syntactic structures in a child's production system can be measured by the lexical diversity in examples of that structure produced (Hadley et al, 2014;Hadley, McKenna, & Rispoli, 2018;Rispoli et al, 2009). In much the same manner as Hadley et al (2018) focused on subject diversity for sentences, this analysis focuses on internal argument diversity, because the internal argument is held in common across all three levels.…”

“…Note that the subject of these transitive sentences is optional. Argument diversity was operationalized in much the same way as subject diversity was operationalized in Hadley et al (2018); that is, each different noun or pronoun is considered a different type. Modification of the noun, for example, by a demonstrative pronoun, possessive determiner, or adjective (e.g., this book, his book, red book), does not constitute a new type.…”

The influence of limited scope formulae on children’s subject-copula combinations

“…Typically developing toddlers acquiring English provide evidence that tense and agreement morphemes develop in a predictable sequence. Children use copula is in multiple unique sentences before the other tense morphemes such as past tense -ed and auxiliaries emerge [5,6]. Furthermore, tense and agreement morphemes develop systematically with correct uses of the copula relating to accurate uses of the later developing morphemes through cross-morpheme facilitation [7][8][9].…”