Ebook: The Acquisition of Complex Sentences

This new and pathbreaking study provides the first ever comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences. Drawing on observational data, Holger Diessel investigates the spontaneous speech of English-speaking children aged between two and five, examining the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and non-finite relative clauses, and co-ordinate clauses. His investigation shows that simple, non-embedded sentences gradually evolve into biclausal constructions, and that two different developmental pathways can be distinguished: complement and relative clauses evolve from simple sentences that are expanded to multiple clause constructions; and adverbial and co-ordinate clauses develop from simple sentences that are integrated into a specific biclausal unit. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the ambient language, the complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the child's social-cognitive development.