Stromswold, Why Children Understand and Misunderstand Sentences 1 Why Children Understand and Misunderstand Sentences: An Eye-tracking Study of Passive Sentences*

Although by 3or 4-years of age, children are remarkably good at understanding most sentences, many studies have shown that even 5and 6-year old children have difficulty understanding some types of sentences. The reason(s) why are unclear in large part because we know little about how children process sentences. To investigate how children process the sentences, we collected accuracy, reaction time, and eye-gaze data while 3to 6-year old English-speaking children listened to active and passive sentences and performed a picture-matching comprehension task. Consistent with previous work, children were faster and more accurate on active than passive sentences. Our data suggest that, although 3-year old children have (at least some of) the linguistic machinery that underlies passives, they cannot interpret them, and even 6-year old children’s processing of passives is not yet adult-like insomuch as it is off-line. Our data further suggest that at age 5, children still rely on a 1 NP = Agent heuristic to process active and passive sentences, but that by age 6, children only use the 1 NP = Agent heuristic when they misinterpret passives. Thus, we argue that children misinterpret passives, not because of syntactic limitations, but rather because of sentence processing limitations. More generally, we argue that children’s sentence processing is still developing at age 6.