Developmental disfluency and emerging grammar. II. Co-occurrence of disfluency with specified semantic-syntactic structures.
From a corpus of over 47,000 spontaneous utterances from four nonstuttering preschool children who were beginning to use syntax, 4,881 multiword, disfluent utterances were identified. Semantic-syntactic structures were identified among the disfluent multiword utterances and differences in frequency of structures were examined. There was variability in the developmental disfluency of the individual children, but each child's pattern of disfluency was systematic across time. Developmental disfluency shifted across structures systematically for each child and appeared to reflect a "practice effect" for those children beginning to learn syntax. The co-occurrence of disfluency with specific syntactic structures supported the premise that developmental disfluency was more strongly attached to the syntax of utterances than to the production of particular words.
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D012660:Semantics