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)

Investigated preschool children's understanding of temporal relationships in terms of their comprehension of sentences containing clauses linked by "before" and "after". Also evaluated was the relative importance of order of mention and main-subordinate relations strategies in children's interpretation of temporal order information. (Author/SDH)

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…

The ability of children at different ages to distinguish instructions to "ask" from instructions to "tell" and the types of structures used to express these directives were studied. Subjects were 120 children, aged 2 years 6 months to 6 years 6 months. Children were instructed to either ask or tell an adult or another child to give them puzzle…