load and children's language processing

[Joe Stemberger]

Matt Rispoli brought up the following:

 > 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?


There was a bit of work in the 1970's and 1980's that addressed this to
some extent (but didn't explore it to that great a depth). The first
thing that comes to mind is:

Crystal, D. (1987). Towards a 'bucket' theory of language disability:
Taking account of interaction between linguistic levels. Clinical
Linguistics and Phonetics, 1, 7-22.


And it's been a long time since I looked at the following book:

Scollon, R.T. (1976). Conversations with a one-year-old. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.

But, as I recall, there's some discussion in there about how
phonological form can sometimes be less accurate in sentences than in
single-word utterances, and the discussion addresses resource
limitations. Unfortunately, as I recall, he doesn't break the
phonological effects down into phenomena that directly involve the
interaction of elements in different words (such as assimilations,
avoidance of consonant clusters, difficulty of wS, etc.) and those that
involve more reduced pronunciations simply because the words are in
sentences.


---Joe Stemberger
UBC