ABSTRACT
The speech of very young children has a peculiar force in eliciting these sorts of expanded imitations from adults. Changes with age in the use of imitations and expansions are also suggestive. As suggestive as the entire preceding train of argument may be, however, we have virtually no evidence that adult expansions of child speech play any essential or even facilitative role in normal grammatical development. The issue here, of course, is to determine which aspects of adult-child dialogue are especially facilitative to grammatical development. Courtney B. Cazden expected to find that both expansion and modeling would result in greater grammatical development in comparison with the control group, but that expansion would be the superior technique. Individual children in the groups had daily sessions of 30-40 minutes with an adult.
