Actionality and mental imagery in children's comprehension of declaratives

Previous work has demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This actionality effect has been reported to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5; 0-7; 11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate-argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for non-actional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.