S0305000916000210jra 1..15

Average differences in children’s language abilities by socioeconomic status (SES) emerge early in development and predict academic achievement. Previous research has focused on coarse-grained outcome measures such as vocabulary size, but less is known about the extent to which SES differences exist in children’s strategies for comprehension and learning. We measured children’s (N = ) comprehension of passive sentences to investigate whether SES differences are more pronounced in overall knowledge of the construction or in more specific abilities to process sentences during real-time interpretation. SES differences in comprehension emerged when syntactic revision of passives was necessary, and disappeared when the need to revise was removed. Further, syntactic revision but not knowledge of the passive best explained the association between * This work was supported by an NSF IGERT fellowship (#) to KL and a UMCP ADVANCE grant to YTH and MR. We are grateful to L. Abadie, D. Bemaman, M. Kahwaty, K. Lippitt, and others in the Language and Cognition Laboratory for help with data collection and coding, and to Jeff Lidz for commenting on an earlier version of the paper. Address for correspondence: Kathryn A. Leech, University of Maryland – Human Development and Quantitative Methodology,  Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland , United States. e-mail: [email protected] J. Child Lang., Page  of . © Cambridge University Press  doi:./S