Shijie Zhang, Bianca Junge, Elena Lieven, Silke Brandt and Anna Theakston have a new paper published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research entitled The Competition Between Processing and Discourse-Pragmatic Factors in Children's and Adults' Production of Adverbial When-Clauses.
Their findings show that young children were strongly affected by processing-based factors (i.e., clause length and clause order) in their production of complex sentences and tended to order main and when-clauses in a way that requires less planning and processing load. However, children have not yet attained an adult-like sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic factors (i.e., information structure). Click here for the open access version.