The Acquisition of Complex Sentences

This comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences investigates spontaneous speech in English-speaking children between ages two and five. After examining the acquisition of numerous types of clauses, Holger Diessel argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the language, the complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the child's social-cognitive development.

• The first ever comprehensive study of how children acquire complex sentences
• Based on observation of five English-speaking children between the ages of 2 and 5
• Looks at the acquisition of a broad range of different constructions, such as complement clauses, relative clauses, adverbials and co-ordinates