Principal Investigator: Nina Hyams
This project investigates children’s understanding of ellipsis-i.e. sentences that contain omitted material that is understood by the linguistic context. Children’s abilities to “sluice” implicit information, that is, sentences that require a child to recover information that is either stated earlier in a sentence or is retrievable from a context will provide interesting insights into their grammatical and cognitive development. The study focuses on development in children between the ages of 4-6 years olds for which there have been no previous studies and their errors and difficulties could help investigations into what factors might produce better more efficient speech therapies going forward.