Syntactic and Strategic Aspects of the Comprehension of Indirect and Direct Object Constructions By Children

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Abstract
One hundred children aged five to thirteen were asked to demonstrate their comprehension of ambiguous and unambiguous double-object constructions of English sentences. In the unambiguous cases article or disjuncture clues were used to indicate which words of the sentence predicates belonged to the indirect and direct object constituents. Results indicate that children tend to prefer a reading of the ambiguous sentences in which the last two nominal elements of nominal + nominal + nominal predicates are assigned to the direct object (as opposed to assigning only the last noun to the direct object). For unambiguous sentences, the younger children have great difficulty in correctly assigning the indicated constituent structure while the older children (and adults) have little difficulty. The use of the article as the indicator of constituent structure is found to be, for the children, a superior clue to the use of disjuncture, and the acquisition of the two comprehensional skills appears to proceed independently.

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