The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds' (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events:…

These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (e.g., "Boys are good at math") and nongeneric sentences (e.g., "Johnny is good at math") shapes children's social cognition. These sentence types are hypothesized to have different implications about the source and nature of the properties conveyed. Specifically, generics may…

It was hypothesized that children may experience more difficulty in interpreting "after" than "before" because the sentence typically used in comprehension tasks facilitates dependence on sentence-processing strategies effective with "before" sentences but only partially effective with "after" sentences. For…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

This study examined the effects of sentence length and correct syntax on sentence imitation in 54 first-, second-, and fifth-grade elementary school children. The same children were asked to perform an additional discrimination task between normal and scrambled sentences. (Author/CS)

Children ranging in age from three to seven years acted out the meaning of reversible active, cleft, passive, and inverted cleft sentences. (JMB)

Sentence comprehension was examined as a function of speaking rate, sentence difficulty, and listener age and sex. Subjects were 360 normal children aged 5-9. (BRT)

Subjects between 8 and 20 years of age were tested for competence on an exception to a grammatical rule, the minimal distance rule. (Authors)

Investigated the influence of Ukrainian-English bilingualism on first and third grade children's awareness of the arbitrary nature of word-referent relationships and on their ability to analyze linguistic input. (JMB)

In this study the part of the sentence which constitutes what the speaker is talking about is called the topic" of the sentence, and the rest of the sentence is the comment", which provides new information about the topic. (Author/MB)

Results imply that in early childhood education the language of test instructions and reading programs could be better geared to the child's linguistic competence. (Author)

Reveals that young children acquiring Mandarin Chinese differentiate subject from topic, even though Chinese is a "topic-prominent" language. Data are based on results of a standardized, elicited imitation test of 95 Chinese children in Taiwan. Subjects between 2 years, 6 months and 5 years of age responded to coordinate as well as…

This study examined the factors influencing the choice of the conjunctions "and" or "but" in joining two clauses of a compound sentence. Subjects were students at first-, fourth-, seventh-, and tenth-grade and adult levels. (Author/ED)

Study was an attempt to explain the observed difference associated with sentence type in the performance of children and the absence of a similar difference in the performance of college students. (Author)