López-Ornat, S. , Gómez Martínez-Piñeiro, F. & Gallego, C.
Departamento de Procesos Cognitivos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
A detailed investigation on syntactic-seeming changes in the speech of a Spanish child (20 - 27 months) was carried out. It was hypothesised the process would be gradual, and show local dependencies, rather than reflect underlying abstract syntactic rules. All the child´s productions during 7 months were coded, and analyzed with CLAN (CHILDES Database instrument) to identify such changes. The syntactic structure of the mother’s input was similarly analysed. The data were tested statistically for the significance of differences found. Unexpected results show that along with the two-word constructions, the child produced elliptical forms, increasingly so over time. Linguistic experience seems partly responsible for this, as analysis of input to the child found a constant number of elliptical constructions. Input and output, nevertheless, did not match perfectly. There were interesting differences in the syntactic structure of the elliptical forms of child and mother, probably reflecting the bias introduced by the child´s own learning system. Finally, the child´s elliptical forms were only situational at the beginning becoming gradually more general. The findings support the hypothesis and provide unforeseen insight into the role of syntactic fragments of input and output in the formation of the syntactic processing system.