A processing model for children's sentence comprehension: A discussion of two studies by Janellen Huttenlocher

Huttenlocher and coworkers studied children's comprehension of sentences by looking at the times required by these children to put an object in the place specifiec by the sentence. The explanations offered by these investigators for their data are discussed. A model which assumes that three processing stages are involved in comprehension is proposed to explain Huttenlocher's data. In these stages, the experimenter's sentence is transformed so as to derive an active sentence in which the to-be-moved object is the grammatical subject, and which specifies the relative position to which this object has to be moved. The model yields reaction time predictions which seem to fit the data well.