Sentence contexts as facilitators of noun pair learning in children

Fifth graders were asked to learn noun pairs embedded in sentence contexts varied in terms of verb voice and grammatical relations. Also, their ability to reproduce sentence contexts for nouns was examined. Recall was prompted with both first- and final-position nouns. Results indicated that variations in deep structure grammatical relations but not surface structure complexity influenced noun pair retrieval. Subjects' incidental memory for the deep structure of sentences was substantial, suggesting that learners were noticing and making use of the meaningful relations aroused between nouns by the contexts. Various sentence generative strategies involving verb voice and noun prompt position were noted.