Bottleneck Processing

Sometimes children drop down certain words in the beginning of their language acquisition stage. It becomes very difficult for them to find the right word and combine it with another keeping in mind all the syntactic and semantic rules that they have acquired.As a result, their circuits get overloaded and they can’t produce or include certain words which they wanted. This process of dropping down certain words is called Bottleneck Processing.

It is observed from various experiments that they have a tendency to frequently drop the Subjects of the utterances almost 60% more than the Verbs or the Objects in a S-V-O structured sentence. 4% to 14% of the time, they drop the Objects and they rarely miss the Verbs. They rarely drop the Verbs because Verbs are Action Words and children usually communicate to express their needs. The longer the utterance is, the more they drop certain words. Generally, they drop functional words like Determiners, Conjunctions and Prepositions more than content words like Nouns, Verbs and so on.

For example, a child may utter “want ball” instead of the grammatically correct and adult-like sentence “I want the ball” due to Bottleneck Processing. In this case, we can see that the Subject “I” and the Determiner “the” is caught in the bottleneck.Even though this occurs, they are still able to communicate successfully and over time, they overcome this problem.