SVO comprehension strategies reconsidered: the evidence of individual patterns of response

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Abstract
Several researchers (e.g. Bever 1970, Strohner & Nelson 1974) have suggested that young children commonly employ a word-order strategy of the form: ‘the first mentioned participant is agent’ when interpreting active and passive sentences. Pre-school children (aged 2; 6–5; 0) were presented with reversible active and passive sentences in four comprehension test settings (two acting-out tasks, a selection task and a verification task). Their responses were analysed not in terms of the percentage correct responses for each group of subjects, as has been the usual practice, but in terms of each individual child's pattern of responses. The results revealed age-related changes in the type of response patterns found. The response pattern associated with the word-order strategy was not a frequent occurrence. The most common patterns were those accounted for by extralinguistic cues such as the relative proximity, mobility or position of the referents. The significance of early interpretation rules of this sort for any characterization of young children's language comprehension processes is discussed.

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