ABSTRACT
Studies of adult language production employ a variety of measures of adult spontaneous and elicited utterances to infer the mechanism by which a message is transformed into a perceivable signal and what (if any) intermediate representations are generated along the way. On the surface, this goal differs from that of most studies of children’s language production, which try to explain why child forms deviate from adult forms. The aim of this chapter is to begin to close this apparent gap between studies of child and adult production by drawing parallels between child forms and several types of adult speech. Towards this end, we provide examples from our own research illustrating the ways that some child language researchers treat the relation between child and adult forms. We then show that remarkably similar phenomena exist in both child and adult utterances. Ultimately we suggest that these parallels should not be treated as coincidental, but as evidence of the need for a single developmentally plausible model of language production.
