Processing Load in Children's Language Production: A Clinically Oriented Review of Research

Investigations of the way that processing load variations may affect the form, content and adequacy of children's utterances are surprisingly limited. The purpose of this review article is to identify and synthesize the primary findings from the broader literature on language production, including studies of adults and children with normal and impaired language, that can provide insights into the sources and effects of processing load on children's productions. The evidence in this literature points to three important characteristics of language production processing: (1) The total costs of a speaking situation can exceed a speaker's processing resources, (2) language operations can vary in their costs, and (3) processing costs in one domain of language can affect performance in another. The final sections of this paper discuss the implications of these characteristics of language processing for interpreting children's language productions and supporting their communicative success.