load and children's language processing

[Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

wouldn't on-line studies where, for instance, the child is monitoring
for a specific word but where syntax is increasingly complex within
which the word is embedded, be a possible approach?
A.

At 10:02 am -0500 29/10/04, Matthew Rispoli wrote:
>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