Children's comprehension of grammatical structures in context

Children from nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade were asked to select pictures which correctly represented the propositional content of six grammatical structures-active, passive, cleft-agent, cleft-patient, prepositional beneficiary, indirect object presented under three context conditions-appropriate, inappropriate, isolation. In the appropriate-context condition the relationship between the target structure and its prior context sentence followed known discourse regularities about the allocation of given and new information, while in the inappropriate-context condition the relationship between the target structure and prior context violated these discourse regularities. Comprehension of two of the grammatical structures tested—the passive and the cleft-patient—was better under the appropriate-context treatment than under the inappropriate-context treatment, indicating that young children are in fact sensitive to discourse regularities about the allocation of given and new information.The research reported herein was part of Gourley's Ph.D. dissertation for Cornell University, which was directed by Catlin. An earlier version of this article was presented by Gourley at the 1974 Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Amherst, Massachusetts.Deceased.