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.

Provides the first ever comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences.

Holger Diessel is a Research Fellow in the Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.