Purpose: This study examines the contribution of number morphology to language comprehension abilities among children with specific language impairment (SLI) and age-matched controls. It addresses the question of whether number agreement facilitates the comprehension accuracy of object-initial declarative sentences. According to the predictions of…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

An investigation of how Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight interpret sentences involving the universal quantifier "mei" ("every") and the quantificational adverbs "dou" ("all") and "quan" ("all") focused on how and when the child acquires adult interpretations of the…

This study looked at the period when language development overlaps the early years of reading, to see how children read and comprehend complex syntactic structures. Thirty-six second, third, and fourth graders, who were considered average readers, were tested in the first experiment using a reading test to determine comprehension of individual…

A study of the process of listeners' and readers' generation and verification of expectations about spoken and written discourse presented to them examined the possible interactions between surface form and cognitive constraints, to establish baseline measures of the effectiveness of different sentence structures in constraining the production of…

Comprehension of complement clauses embedded into 4 matrix verbs in Greek, equivalent to English in syntactic and semantic constraints, was studied among 32 mildly retarded and 32 nonretarded Greek elementary-level students. Results indicated equal comprehension, but retarded subjects lacked metalinguistic ability. Digit span and verbal…

A study investigated Japanese 3-to-5-year-olds' comprehension of sentences using the temporal terms "before" and "after" and examined whether contextual information helped the children respond correctly. The children were asked to perform a task with a toy either before or after performing another task with a different toy.…

The relationship between ease of comprehension and the syntactic form used to convey indirect requests was investigated among intermediate and advanced learners of English as a second language (ESL). The results were compared to those of native English speaking children and adults. Subjects were 82 college students enrolled in intensive ESL…

To assess a child's communicative ability, it is important to develop not only measures of his understanding of vocabulary, but of his understanding of the syntax of language: patterns of words, regularities, and relationships of words in a sentence. Controlled test situations should be established in which the child receives minimal cues from the…

Sentence comprehension is a complex task that involves both language-specific processing components and general cognitive resources. Comprehension can be made more difficult by increasing the syntactic complexity or the presentation rate of a sentence, but it is unclear whether the same neural mechanism underlies both of these effects. In the…

Recent work in syntactic theory has revealed that word order is more constrained in subordinate clauses, particularly nonasserted clauses, than in main clauses (Ross, 1973; Hooper & Thompson, 1973). On the other hand, main clauses are restricted in the extent to which they allow pronominalization and verb phrase deletion (Lakoff, 1968). These…

The purpose of this series of four studies was to precisely describe the code and dialect features of the speech of both lower class Negro children and middle class white children. In the first study, 16 white middle class (WMC) children were compared to 16 Negro lower class (NLC) children on both an imitation and a comprehension task. The WMC…

Attempts to distinguish the role of the structure of a message in determining the different modalities of decodification and memorization in oral discourse based on the theories and experiments of Ragnar Rommetveit of the Oslo School. (CFM)