The Development of Complex Sentence Processing Strategies
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-1980
Abstract
Children aged 3, 4, and 5 years and adults heard sentences with clauses connected by after, and, or before, saw a picture, and indicated whether or not the picture matched one of the events of the sentence. Response times were taken as a measure of immediate accessibility to the meaning of the clause that the picture was about. Temporal organization of sentence meanings was dominant in 3-year-olds and adults, but not in 4- or 5-year-olds. The 3-year-olds and especially the adults processed and-sentences as implicitly temporal. The results for 4- and 5-year-olds are interpreted as indicating experimentation with alternate strategies for organizing sentences based on the structural/presuppositional properties of clauses.
DOI
10.1016/0022-0965(80)90091-0
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Townsend, David and Ravelo, Norma, "The Development of Complex Sentence Processing Strategies" (1980). Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 485.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/psychology-facpubs/485