A Comparison of Two Procedures to Elicit Verbal Auxiliary and Copula in Normal Kindergarten Children

Abstract

Fourteen normal kindergarten children, all of whom spontaneously used verbal auxiliary and copular forms of BE (VACs) were studied. Two cloze procedures were designed to elicit all three forms of present tense VACs in uncontractible sentence positions. The syntactic elicitation (SE) procedure required the children to observe a syntactic constraint within a descriptive response; the emphatic elicitation (EE) procedure required observation of a stress constraint within a role-playing response. Personal pronouns were used as sentence subjects in both procedures. Results indicated that both procedures were effective in eliciting VACs approximately 75% of the time. The SE procedure was more effective than the EE procedure overall. The procedures did not differ in their ability to elicit auxiliary and copular forms. The effects of subject pronoun person and singular vs. plural verb form are discussed. The procedures have implications for supplementing spontaneous language samples in assessing expressive language.