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“Whatdunit?” Developmental Changes In Children’S Syntactically-Based Sentence Interpretation Abilities And Sensitivity To Word Order, James W. Montgomery, Julia L. Evans, Ronald B. Gillam, Alexander V. Sergeev, Mianisha C. Finney

Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling Faculty Publications

Aim 1 of this study was to examine the developmental changes in typically developing English-speaking children’s syntactically-based sentence interpretation abilities and sensitivity to word order. Aim 2 was to determine the psychometric standing of the novel sentence interpretation task developed for this study, as we wish to use it later with children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Children listened to semantically implausible sentences in which noun animacy and the natural affordance between the nouns were removed, thus controlling for event probability. Using this novel “whatdunit?” agent selection task, 256 children 7-11 years listened to two structures with canonical word order …