Sentence Interpretation Strategies in Monolingual English Preschool Children

Through the manipulation of the syntactic cue of word order and the semantic cues of noun animacy and noun size order, this study explores how different cue strength affects a child’s interpretation of a sentence. Subjects included 36 children [Mean age=50.72 mo.; SD=7.3 mo.]. A sentence interpretation test was administered to participants who would choose the “doer” of the sentence. Significant main effects were observed for word order, animacy, and size-order, including a significant interaction between animacy and size order. In addition, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, 4 edition (PPVTTM-4) was administered to participants to determine their vocabulary level. Results show that preschool children use a combination of syntactic and semantic cues to interpret sentences. Interestingly, age and vocabulary are not correlated with children’s use of syntactic and semantic cues. A future study, with younger participants to distinguish when the shift from semantic dependence to syntactic dependence occurs, is warranted.