ABSTRACT
Most interesting is the fact that the oldest children showed greater increments in relevant constructions in the new rule (NR) than in the English rule condition. The verbal stimuli were 95 nouns which are commonly known by children of the youngest age used. Of particular interest in this study was the influence of rule familiarity and age upon increments in the subjects' production of sentences which precisely fitted the modeled rule. The performance of the subjects exposed to unfamiliar constructions supports this conclusion. Instead of abstracting a new rule from the model's productions, the subjects in these conditions apparently reordered the unfamiliar language constructions to make them correspond to language rules with which they were familiar. An inspection of the repetition errors in the NR condition indicated that most were reordered forms of the modeled NR constructions.
