Sentence comprehension in preschool children: testing an adaptive egocentrism hypothesis

A hypothesis proposing that preoperational egocentrism serves an adaptive function was used to predict the comprehension behavior of preschool children presented with sentences varying on a "personal" dimension. Personal sentences containing the subject's name were contrasted at 2 levels of syntactic complexity with impersonal sentences containing other familiar nouns. Significant effects were found for age, semantics, and syntax (all p's less than .001), with no sex effects or interactions. Personal sentences were better comprehended than impersonals at both levels of syntactic complexity. A second experiment was conducted to rule out "focusing of attention" as an alternative explanation. Variations in the likelihood of occurrence of the depicted event were added to the personal-impersonal contrast. High-probability personal sentences were significantly better understood than low-probability sentences, whether personal or impersonal (p less than .001). Results supported the adaptive egocentrism hypothesis in that sentence content describing the child and his personal experience facilitates the child's comprehension.