Development of Ability to Process Syntactic Structures in Expanded Discourse

This study compared the abilities of 30 sixth-grade, competent readers and 30 adult, competent readers to process syntactic structures under conditions of related and unrelated discourse. Eye movements were recorded while subjects silently read right- and left-embedded syntactic structures in conditions presenting unrelated sentences and in conditions with related paragraphs. Results suggest the ability to process syntactic and semantic elements is not fully developed in children in the 11- to 12-yr. range.