A Cross-Linguistic Study of the Development of Sentence Interpretation Strategies

Studies of the development of sentence comprehension strategies in English have indicated that, at first, children tend to rely on pragmatic and semantic strategies, whereas, later on, they rely primarily on word order to determine the basic grammatical relations. However, before making strong conclusions regarding the role of semantics in comprehension, it is necessary to distinguish between (1) extragrammatical knowledge of world events and (2) abstract semantic distinctions that may be an integral part of the parsing process. An earlier study of American and Italian adults indicated that use of such abstract semantic strategies may be a core strategy for parsing in Italian. In the present study, we compared sentence interpretation in American and Italian children between the ages of 2 and 5. From the earliest stages, children showed sensitivity to the relative information value of the various cues in their native language; Italians relied primarily on semantic cues, whereas American children relied on word order. In general, the data did not support claims regarding the existence of universal hypotheses about language structure. There was also evidence that the failure of these young children to make full use of certain interpretive cues resulted from their inability to appreciate the discourse functions of these cues.