Reports outcomes of three experiments in which children were taught a sentence form that they did not as yet understand. Investigates whether (1) acquisition of word order relations for sentence form would be affected by pragmatic ordering principles and (2) whether referent animacy would be included in children's rules for word order. (Author/BE)

Examines effect of training 70 preschool children with animate agent + animate patient sentences (AAV) or animate agent + inanimate patient sentences (IAV). Children were tested with noun-noun-verb (NNV) order sentence to assess whether AAV or IAV produced better comprehension. AAV and IAV showed comparable results at age three, IAV resulted in…

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

Preschoolers' ability to understand grammatical relations in passives and to generalize was studied using animate referents. Three- to five-year-old children were taught to produce passive sentence descriptions of events in which animacy of the actor and acted-on object were varied. After pretesting to determine passive sentence comprehension, the…