An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute: A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/ HTML Version(1997)

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II.4.13 The Development of Syntactic Structures in Children's Speech from 3 to 6

(Report 50, 1973. 267 pages)
This book is a report on the syntactic structures in pre-school children's speech. We used transcriptions of recordings of the speech of 305 pre-school children between the ages of 3 and 6 as data for this study. These data are published in 7 volumes as Pre-School Children's Speech Transcription Cards. This survey deals with the following topics: "Structures and Uses of Children's Simple Sentences," "Structures and Uses of Nominal Modifying Words," "Structures and Uses of Sentence-Ending Forms," "Length of Children's Utterances," and "Structural Analysis of Supplementary Utterances." In addition, the following characteristics of the syntactic structure of pre-school children's speech were identified. 1. Pre-school children used a variety of syntactic structures. 2. Remarkable development occurred between the ages of 3 and 6. 3. Pre-school children did not use nominal modifying clauses until the age of 6. 4. 3- to 4-year old children used the conjunctive particle, KARA, as a sentence-final particle and often ended sentences expressing reason in this way. They rarely used the structure "... DA KARA,... DA" to clearly connect two sentences. 5. Children often used the conjunctions, SOREDE, SOSITE as interjections. In particular, they often used the grammatical structures, "...SITE, SOREDE...," "...SITE, SOSITE...," and thus, their sentences were rarely disconnected. OKUBO Ai directed this survey and wrote up the results. The following related research reports are available. OKUBO Ai, "Syntactic Development of the Speech of Pre-School Children- Using a Series of Three Picture Cards to Elicit Speech," (Study of Language, Volume IV, 1973.) OKUBO Ai, "Development of the Ability to Connect Sentences in Children from Pre-School Age to Elementary School Grade 6," in Annual Report 26, 1975.

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