The Effect of Intonational Emphasis on Sentence Comprehension in Severely Subnormal and Normal Children

The effect of intonational emphasis on the sentence comprehension of severely subnormal and normal pre-school children was investigated by stressing the critical elements of sentences of varying syntactic structure. The results concurred with previous work insofar as intonational emphasis did not facilitate comprehension. There was, however, some evidence to show that intonational emphasis may have a detrimental effect on the subnormal child's comprehension of negative structures.