Adults' Sentence Fragments
- 1 August 1992
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Communication Research
- Vol. 19 (4), 444-458
- https://doi.org/10.1177/009365092019004003
Abstract
The distribution of sentence fragments was examined in a corpus of spontaneous narratives told by two groups of adults, a young-old group 60 to 74 years of age and an old-old group 75 to 90 years of age. Although there was no overall increase in the occurrence of sentence fragments with age, there was a change in where fragments occurred and what types of fragments occurred. Young-old adults were more likely to produce false starts, whereas old-old adults were more likely to produce filled pauses; both types of fragments were more common in embedded clauses of complex sentences than in the main clauses. Hence the production of sentence fragments appears to be associated with syntactic processing problems that contribute to word-retrieval problems and sentence reformulation.Keywords
This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit:
- Competing complexity metrics and adults' production of complex sentencesApplied Psycholinguistics, 1992
- On the tip of the tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and older adults?Journal of Memory and Language, 1991
- Caregiver Report of Prevalence and Appearance Order of Linguistic Symptoms in Alzheimer's PatientsThe Gerontologist, 1991
- Telling stories: The structure of adults' narrativesThe European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1990
- Adults' diaries: Changes made to written narratives across the life spanDiscourse Processes, 1990
- Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genreApplied Psycholinguistics, 1989
- Syntactic complexity and elderly adults' prose recallExperimental Aging Research, 1987
- Aging and the loss of grammatical forms: a cross-sectional study of language performanceLanguage & Communication, 1986
- Discourse Performance in Older AdultsInternational Journal of Aging & Human Development, 1986
- Perception of Spoken Communication by Elderly Chronically Ill Patients in an Institutional SettingJournal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 1981