Stored Word Sequences in Language Learning: The Effect of Familiarity onChildren's Repetition of Four-Word Combinations.

Recent accounts of the development of grammar (Tomasello, 2003) propose that childrenremember utterances they hear and draw generalizations over these stored exemplars. This studysought to test this account’s assumption that children store utterances as wholes by testingmemory for familiar sequences of words. Using a newly-available, dense corpus of childdirected speech, we identified frequently-occurring chunks in the input (e.g. sit in your chair)and matched, infrequent sequences (e.g. sit in your truck). We tested preschoolers’ ability toproduce these sequences in a sentence repetition test. Twenty-one 3-year-olds and 17 2-yearoldswere significantly more likely to correctly repeat frequent than infrequent sequences.Moreover, 3-year-olds were significantly faster to repeat the first 3 words of an item if theyformed part of a chunk (e.g. quicker to say sit in your when followed by chair than truck). Wediscuss the implications for theories of language development and processing.