load and children's language processing

[Matthew Rispoli]

Hi All,

Nice question.  The study of processing load in children's comprehension and production is an interesting one.  It has always been mildly surprising to me that the discipline of developmental psycholinguistics actually spends relatively little time investigating it.  One thing that has struck me from the initial responses is the following. When this question has been investigated, it often seems to have been investigated through a dual-task, divided attention paradigm.  As Brian points out, in such a paradigm it is the load of the external demands that impacts linguistic processing.  What has interested me for the last few years are the demands arising from within language * the endogenous factors that burden a child's sentence production capacity.  I think this is a very rich area, in which we can ask, how do the structures and items children acquire impact initial and over time, sentence production capacity?  
Matt Rispoli