Hostname: page-component-7f64f4797f-9h5t2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-11-04T09:37:37.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Preschool children's sentence comprehension: strategies with respect to word order*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Henrietta Lempert  and
Marcel Kinsbourne
Henrietta Lempert
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Marcel Kinsbourne
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Fifty-two children aged 2; 5 to 6; 3 acted out the meaning of reversible passive and inverted cleft sentences. The younger children overgeneralized two strategies that led to passive sentence reversal. In order of frequency, they are: (1)‘agent + action’ (the noun preceding the verb being interpreted as agent even when it is the second noun), and (2) ‘order-of-mention’ (the first noun being treated as agent). Whereas younger children tended to use an individually consistent approach to both structures, older children were more likely to vary their approaches when they did not comprehend a structure.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 371 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

We gratefully acknowledge indebtedness to Peter Landry, Phyllis Couse, Joanna Briggs and staff of the Learning Center, Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto, for their assistance and interest. This research was funded by Medical Research Council Grant MA-6461. Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1.

References

REFERENCES

Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structure. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Chapman, R. S. & Kohn, L. L. (1977). Comprehension strategies in two- and three-year-olds: animate agents or probable events? Paper presented at Stanford Child Language Forum, Stanford, California.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kail, M. & Segui, J. (1978). Developmental production of utterances from a series of lexemes. JChLang 5. 251–60.Google Scholar
Lempert, H. & Kinsbourne, M. (1978). Children's comprehension of word order: a developmental investigation. ChDev 49. 1235–8.Google Scholar
Maratsos, M. P. (1974). Children who get worse at understanding the passive: a replication of Bever. JPsycholingRes 3. 65–74.Google Scholar
Palermo, D. & Molfese, D. L. (1972). Language acquisition from age five onward. PsychBull 78. 409–28.Google Scholar
Sinclair, H. & Bronckart, J. P. (1972). SVO—a linguistic universal. JExpChPsychol 14. 329–48.Google Scholar
Sinclair-de Zwart, H. (1973). Language acquisition and cognitive development. In Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Strohner, H. & Nelson, K. E. (1974). The young child's development of sentence comprehension: influence of event probability, nonverbal context, syntactic form, and strategies. ChDev 45. 567–76.Google Scholar