On Children's Comprehension of Synonymous Sentences

Abstract

Tests of language comprehension usually include very simple tasks: for example, subjects may be asked to respond to commands, to select pictures which correspond to relations expressed in sentences, and to respond to questions with yes/no answers. There is often also a crossing over from one sensory modality to another in these tests. Thus to select a picture that correctly depicts the sentence The girl showed the cat the dog, a child brings into play both auditory and visual modalities as well as motor activity. Though these tests, along with sentence imitation, have been very useful in studies by Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown and by Paula Menyuk, they frequently impose constraints on the sentences that can be tested.1 Obviously one has to use picturable relations in tests incorporating visual stimuli; commands, by their very nature, impose strong constraints on the kinds of sentences that may be used. Imitation permits greater variety in sentence structure than the other tests, but it is in itself no certain test of understanding. It is, after all, possible to mimic nonsense. Despite these limitations, however, students of language development have been quite successful in using tests like these to demonstrate that children, even before entering first grade, understand the basic system of language. Yet generative grammar implies much more about man's comprehension of language than what these tasks, in themselves, can reveal. Imitating, obeying simple commands, selecting pictures, and answering yes/no questions generally permit us to explore only partially the strong linkages between understanding and transformational processes. One instance of a problem in comprehension that these tasks leave untouched and that this study investigates is the development in children of a sense that sentences may mean the same thing though they differ somewhat in grammatical style. In other words, the differences between synonymous sentences may be due only to the optional transformations that are used to derive their manifest forms. For example, the sentence The girl showed the cat the dog may