Children's Comprehension of Relativized English Sentences

BROWN, H. DOUGLAS. Children's Comprehension of Relativized English Sentences. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1971, 42, 1923-1936. 3 factors in the syntactic structure of restrictive relative clauses, (a) embeddedness position of the clause, (b) focus of the relative pronoun, and (c) the relative pronoun itself, were incorporated into a picture-cued comprehension test administered to 3 groups of children 3, 4, and 5 years of age. Analysis of variance showed that in overall performance 3-year-olds had significantly lower scores than 4and 5-year-olds. Embeddedness was nonsignificant except in the case of an added structural ambiguity. Subject focus was significantly easier to comprehend than object focus (p < .01). In 1 phase relative pronouns were nonsignificant, but in another phase 1 pair of pronouns was significantly harder (p < .05) than another pair. Results imply that in early childhood education the language of test instructions and reading programs could be better geared to the child's linguistic competence.