Syntax of Preschool Fluent and Disfluent Speech: A Transformational Analysis

Speech samples were obtained from 13 highly fluent and 13 highly disfluent four-year-old children who were comparable as to sex, intelligence, socioeconomic status, race, and educational history. The syntactic analysis dealt with kernel and matrix sentence frame types and transformational usage. The fluent group used significantly more double-base transformations than the disfluent group, but the two groups were comparable on the distribution of usage for sentence frame types. This evidence indicates that a non-loci explanation of disfluency should be cast in terms of the nature of transformational operations in grammatical performance.