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Modified repetition in poems elicited from young children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Ann D. Dowker
Ann D. Dowker*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.
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Abstract

Attempts were made to elicit poems from 133 children between the ages of 2;3 and 6;11. Seventy-eight of the children produced 606 poems between them. Forty-five per cent of the poems contained the syntactic device of modified repetition: a substitution exercise where a grammatical frame is repeated and the substitution occurs in part of the grammatical frame. This was so despite the fact that modified repetition was not present in the examples that were used to elicit poems from the children. The frequency and types of modified repetition used by the children did not vary much with age. The question of whether children's use of modified repetition in their rhythmical poems has the function of helping them to practise grammatical forms, or whether it is simply one reflection of a general human tendency towards the use of pattern in language, is discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , October 1991 , pp. 625 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

I thank the staff and children of the Coram Children's Centre, the University of London Institute of Education Nursery, the Wimbledon Park Nursery and Preparatory School and the Wimbledon Park Primary School for their help and co-operation. I am also grateful to my supervisors, Dr Neil O'Connor and Professor Hazel Francis of the University of London Institute of Education, for their advice and help. I would like to thank Dr Lynda White of Imperial College, University of London, for valuable discussions about statistics. The research was carried out with the aid of a postgraduate research grant from the Medical Research Council and was written up while I was receiving a post-doctoral fellowship from the British Academy.

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