School-Age Children's Ability to Produce and Judge Syntactic Forms (Metalinguistic Skill)
This study investigated 60 school-age children's ability to produce and judge grammaticality of three verb forms. Grade 1, 2, and 3 children produced the perfect (have taken), perfect progressive (have been taking), and past progressive (was taking) in a story retelling task. They judged grammatical form of these three verb forms in a story context and a context of unrelated sentences. Production results revealed that 8-year-old children produced all forms at a significantly higher rate than the younger children. The past progressive verb form was produced significantly more often than the two perfect forms. The judgment results indicated that age, type of grammatical form, and context were significant factors affecting accuracy of judgment of syntactic form. The children were able to judge grammatical verb forms as correct significantly more often than ungrammatical forms as incorrect. Older children were better able to make judgments concerning grammaticality than younger children. Unrelated sentences were found to be the environment that promoted the highest rate of identification of ungrammatical forms while story context promoted identification of grammatical forms. The syntactic anomalies chosen came from the speech of preschoolers and language delayed children. Errors of auxiliary, suffix, and time adverb (where the time sense of the adverb was not compatible with the tense of the verb form) were used. The adverb anomaly was found to be more difficult to identify as an error than anomalies of auxiliary or suffix. Story context further decreased the rate of error identification of the adverb anomaly. All children judged grammaticality of form at a higher rate than they produced the verb forms in a story retelling task. The factors of grammaticality of form, context, and anomaly were found to have levels that made the judgment task easier or more difficult. This information is clinically relevant. It provides structure for the development of judgment tasks to be used in therapy.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign