[The development of the simple-sentence processing in Japanese children (author's transl)]

The present paper deals with the development of the simple-sentence processing in Japanese children. Subjects were 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds. Experiment I exemplified the hypothesis that in children's processing of the simple sentence there is some span with the phrase as a unit. This was found to develop in parallel with the increase of short-term memory span for words, being about one unit larger than the latter at all age levels. Although sentence length is dominant, structural differences in the sentence of the same length was found to have some effects on the processing in Experiment II. The sentence itself becomes a chunk as early as the age of three.