Investigating Children's Language: A Comparison of Conversational Sampling and Elicited Production

This report compared production of infinitival object complements during conversational language sampling to production on an elicitation task. Subjects included 25 children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4. The children produced more two-noun infinitives and produced infinitives with more main verbs on the elicitation task. In the conversational samples, the children produced infinitives almost exclusively with early-appearing main verbs. These findings suggest that conversational language sampling may underestimate children's grammatical knowledge.