This article discusses a study designed to ascertain the comprehension of the role of "because" in a sentence in children between the ages of 5;8 and 10;11. (CFM)

Preschool children were tested on their comprehension of the comparatives, "taller,""shorter,""more," and "less" in five types of sentences. Results suggest that many children can understand two-dimensional comparisons, but perform poorly on second-clause subjects pronoun sentences because of uncertainty about the referent of the pronoun. (SDH)

This report summarizes two years of research by a team at the University of Austin, aimed at developing and testing a model of sentence comprehension. The general model that has guided the work maintains that, on the basis of cues available in a sentence's surface form, the hearer projects hypotheses about the grammatical relations and semantic…

Active and passive sentences were presented with probable and improbable semantic content to 100 first graders and 100 kindergartners. "Irreversible" sentences were considered improbable. In a design employing syntax, probability, grade, and sex as factors, probability and syntax were found significant both as main effects and in their…

This monograph is based on a doctoral thesis submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota in August 1969. (MG)

The cognitive levels of 60 children from grades one, three, and five were compared with their linguistic performance on selected examples of similes and metaphors. Cognitive level was measured using Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices; a new instrument was developed to assess children's linguistic performance. Results indicated a significant…

This paper reports on a study of the acquisition of subject and object relative clauses by monolingual French speaking children aged 4-10 years, in Rimouski, Quebec. The children were tested for their comprehension of six types of relative sentences. A coordinate sentence control test was administered. An adult control group was also tested on the…

In this experiment, children were given three words (a triplet made up of two nouns and one verb) and were asked to produce an utterance with them. The results were analyzed in terms of word order chosen and age of child. (NCR)

In a study, Tagalog-speaking children, 3-, 5-, and 7-year olds, demonstrated better mastery of patient-focus (passive) than agent-focus (active) sentence structure. These results were attributed to the children's strategy of interpreting the first noun of a sentence to be the agent of the action. (SW)

Comprehension of the quantifiers "some" and "all" was studied with 202 children, three to nine years old. Thirty-two quantifier sentences dealing with descriptions of circles and squares were presented to the children. Wooden objects were presented to some children to see if results were affected by the choice of abstract objects, but no…

A study was conducted to determine whether children give evidence of using any of six comprehension strategies and whether children of same and different ages use different strategies. It was studied how comprehension performance can best be predicted by other facts about the child, including his language and his language input. The six…

Comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences was studied with 48 Japanese children between the ages of two and six. Four types of sentences were constructed using passive and active structures and two word orders: subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV). The basic order of elements in a simple sentence in Japanese is…

By age two, a child begins to form complex sentences by joining two or more sentences or by embedding one sentence into another. Formation of conjoined structures is a simpler process and emerges earlier than that of embedding structures. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: (1) Do children produce or understand embedding…

The development of production and comprehension by one two-year-old girl of three Japanese constructions (passives, causatives, and "te moraw"), which have similar surface configurations "NP ga NP ni V ("rare"/ "sase"/ "te moraw") TENSE," is investigated through elicited imitations and responses to the investigator's questions about the content of…