Children's comprehension of grammatical structures in context

Children from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were asked to select pictures which correctly represented the propositional content of six grammatical structures-active, passive, cleft-agent, cleft-patient, prepositional beneficiary, indirect object-presented under three context conditions-appropriate, inappropriate, isolation. In the appropriate-context condition the relationship between the target structure and its prior context sentence followed known discourse regularities about the allocation of given and new information, while in the inappropriate-context condition the relationship between the target structure and prior context violated these discourse regularities. Comprehension of two of the grammatical structures tested--the passive and the cleft-patient--was better under the appropriate-context treatment than under the inappropriate-context treatment, indicating that young children are in fact sensitive to discourse regularities about the allocation of given and new information.