Title

Development of a Metalinguistic Skill: Judging the Grammaticality of Sentences

Authors

Helen Cairns, City University of New York
Gloria Schlisselberg, Mercy College
Dava Waltzman, City University of New York
Dana McDaniel, University of Southern MaineFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

January 2006

Publication Title

Communication Disorders Quarterly

Abstract

Seventy-seven 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children were presented with well-formed and ill-formed versions of 10 different sentence types. They were asked to judge the grammaticality of the sentences and correct the ill-formed ones. The sentences were presented in an interview format, developed by McDaniel and Cairns (1990, 1996). Both grammaticality judgment and correction ability improved with age. It is argued that the ability to make grammaticality judgments and to correct ill-formed sentences reflects the child's developing ability to access syntactic knowledge consciously and to employ that knowledge in the processing of sentences.

Comments

http://cdq.sagepub.com/

Recommended Citation

Cairns, Helen, and Gloria Schlisselberg. "Development of a Metalinguistic Skill: Judging the Grammaticality of Sentences." Communication Disorders Quarterly, vol. 27, no 4, 2006, pp. 213-20.