Children's comprehension of grammatical structures in context

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Children from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were asked to select pictures which correctly represented the propositional content of six grammatical structures-active, passive, cleft-agent, cleft-patient, prepositional beneficiary, indirect object presented under three context conditions-appropriate, inappropriate, isolation. In the appropriate-context condition the relationship between the target structure and its prior context sentence followed known discourse regularities about the allocation of given and new information, while in the inappropriate-context condition the relationship between the target structure and prior context violated these discourse regularities. Comprehension of two of the grammatical structures tested—the passive and the cleft-patient—was better under the appropriate-context treatment than under the inappropriate-context treatment, indicating that young children are in fact sensitive to discourse regularities about the allocation of given and new information.