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CNL Lunch Talks
Andrea Zukowski Thursday Oct 5th 2006, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall From Intention to Articulation: How Getting it Wrong is Helpful
Psycholinguistic work on sentence production is still in its infancy, and
there is much to be learned about the mental journey between a
communicative intention and its articulation. In this talk I will discuss
errors made by children when they attempt to produce relative clauses
embedded in a main clause. The processing task that speakers face is to
map a complex message involving multiple propositions that contain
overlapping participants to a surface string that faithfully and
grammatically expresses this message. The data are from experimental
studies using elicited production. Comparative data elicited with the
same materials are examined from 6 different groups: child speakers of
English and Jakartan Indonesian (both of which have post-nominal relative
clauses), child speakers of Mandarin (which has pre-nominal relative
clauses), older children and adults with mental retardation associated
with Williams syndrome, and adult English speakers. The errors that these
speakers make, and the contexts in which they do and do not make them
provide insight into the difficult steps involved in utterance planning
and execution.
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