Prof. Holly Branigan, The University of Edinburgh
Although dialogue is the primary context through which children encounter and experience language, relatively little experimental research has investigated children’s language use in interactive contexts. However, recent work suggests that interactive context may play a key role in both typically and atypically developing children’s acquisition and consolidation of language, and that studying children’s syntax outside such contexts can provide a misleading picture of their syntactic knowledge. In this talk I’ll argue that interaction offers children a rich resource for exploitation; in particular, the linguistic context provided by an interlocutor provides a potentially important means to scaffold and develop their linguistic abilities. I will consider how the syntax that children hear shapes the syntax that they produce, and propose that this tendency is enhanced during interactive communication by an interplay of linguistic and social factors.
