A reaction time study of grammaticality judgments in children

Grammaticality judgments and decision times for two age groups of normally developing children were studied to determine when parsing decisions are made and how linguistic knowledge affects parsing. Children showed very good sensitivity to grammatical violations, although at somewhat lower levels than those reported for college-age students (Wulfeck, Bates, & Capasso, 1991). Sensitivity results also revealed that both groups of children were better at detecting violations created by permuting words in a sentence than at recognizing errors of morphological selection--a finding that has been observed in adults with Broca's aphasia (Wulfeck & Bates, 1991). Since college students show ceiling performance in their sensitivity to both types of violations, the present study reveals developmental changes in sensitivity to different aspects of morphology during the elementary school years. Although older children processed violations more quickly overall, both groups of children demonstrated very rapid integration of information during sentence processing. Decision time results also indicated that greater sensitivity to word order violations seemed to enhance childrens' ability to take advantage of context across a sentence, resulting in faster decision times.