How young children represent sentences: Evidence from the superiority of noun recall from action as compared to stative sequences

Children of the ages of 4 and 7 years recalled nouns from subject-verb-object sentences more efficiently than from noun pairs. Verbs were either stative or active. Preschoolers recalled more nouns from active than stative phrases, whereas the older children showed no such difference, either in a blocked (Experiment 1) or mixed list (Experiment 2) design. Whereas interaction rather than action seems critical for older children, younger children seem better able to retrieve words from action than from stative representations.