To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Scanpaths have played an important role in classic research on reading behavior. Nevertheless, they have largely been neglected in later research perhaps due to a lack of suitable analytical tools. Recently, von der Malsburg and Vasishth (2011) proposed a new measure for quantifying differences between scanpaths and demonstrated that this measure…

Structural priming paradigms have been influential in shaping theories of adult sentence processing and theories of syntactic development. However, until recently there have been few attempts to provide an integrated account that explains both adult and developmental data. The aim of the present paper was to begin the process of integration by…

By age 2, children attribute referential mental states such as perceptions and emotions to themselves and others, yet it is not until age 4 that they attribute representational mental states such as beliefs. This raises an interesting question: is attribution of beliefs different from attribution of perceptions and emotions in terms of its neural…

An analysis of sentence grammar is made to show that the ability to produce coherent texts emerges slowly and late in linguistic and cognitive development. (HP)

The development of sentence coordination in children using sentences conjoined by "and" was studied to test the adequacy of the transformationally based derivational theory of complexity. Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted using 18 sentence types with children between the ages of three and five. One experiment used an elicited…

Concerns that sentence combining has become the sole means of instruction in some college composition courses, that students are inadvertently getting the view that writing is essentially a mechanical manipulation of parts strung together, and that writing research has reduced writing to architectural structuralism made up of prewriting, writing,…

Recent findings in developmental psycholinguistics have shown that below the age of eight children have difficulty in understanding English sentences that do not conform to normal SVO pattern (Chomsky, 1969). Experiments with French-speaking children are reported which duplicate and extend this research. (Editor)

Results of 3 sentence-interpretation experiments involving 180 preschoolers suggest that very little explicit syntactic knowledge is needed to give children some structural clues to verb meaning. Sentence structure appears to have a meaning of its own that can be applied by analogy to the child's conceptual representation. (SLD)

Sessions of verbal interaction (N=22) significantly facilitated syntax acquisition by 32- to 40-month-olds. In response to children's sentences, experimenters replied with recast sentences that maintained the same meaning but provided new syntactic information. A selective bias in these replies was matched by selectively stronger facilitation in…

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. (VM)

In order to test the hypothesis that the ability to form verbal concepts would increase with age, a test for verbal concept formation was developed and administered to 668 children between the ages of 4 and 9. By varying sentences that describe nonsense figures, 4 variables were systematically explored. (MS)

This study attempted to explore the possibility of increasing sensitivity to syntactic structure by exposing subjects representing a range of ability to a programed sentence structure module. Students in three ninth grade classes who had completed four weeks of supplementary work with "English Sentence Structure: Programed Exercises" and scored 70…

This follow-up study compares cognitive and language aspects of a group of Italian children ages 4-6 years, who had shown delayed expressive language abilities at 24 months of age (late talkers), with those of a group of children with a history of normal expressive language development (average talkers). Children were given a battery of…

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)