Developmental differences in visual and auditory processing of complex sentences.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Child Development
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Understanding how children process complex sentence structures is crucial for educational development.
• Relative clauses and conjoined verb phrases pose significant challenges in language comprehension.
• Memory span influences sentence processing strategies in developing minds.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate on-line and off-line sentence processing in children aged 8-11.
• To examine the role of memory span in processing restrictive relative clauses.
• To identify comprehension strategies used by children with varying memory spans and comprehension abilities.

Main Methods:

• A word-by-word sentence task was administered in visual and auditory modes to 250 children (ages 8-11).
• Sentences included object relative clauses, subject relative clauses, or conjoined verb phrases.
• Participants completed digit span and reading span memory tests, followed by true-false comprehension questions.

Main Results:

• Children with higher digit spans showed increased processing time at relative clause transitions, suggesting a U-shaped learning curve.
• Poor comprehenders employed an incorrect local attachment strategy, misidentifying sentence subjects.
• This local attachment strategy was less consistent in low memory span children and with more difficult sentences.

Conclusions:

• Children's processing of restrictive relative clauses may follow a U-shaped learning pattern.
• Comprehension difficulties in children can stem from specific syntactic processing strategies, like local attachment.
• Memory span and sentence complexity interact with comprehension strategies in developing readers.