Response Strategies in the Partial Comprehension of Sentences

In a sentence comprehension task subjects had to select a correct picture from an array of four presented immediately after hearing a relevant sentence. Sentences were representative of twelve different grammatical structures and were eight words in length. In each array three incorrect pictures (distractors) were representations of lexical variants of the presented sentence. Each variant was derived from the original sentence by changing a content word in either an initial, middle or terminal location respectively of the sentence. Three groups of subjects were tested. They were drawn from Nursery Schools, Primary Schools and from Special Schools for the Educationally Subnormal (ESN). All subjects could be regarded as having a pre-school level of language development. Gross differences in overall error rate between groups were observed though patterns of choices among distractors were the same for all groups. No part of the sentences (in terms of lexical content) appeared to be more vulnerable to information loss than any other. Analysis of successive choices within items showed that failure to comprehend was associated with loss of information about specific lexical items. Theoretically, results are interpreted in relation to a limited capacity information processing model of speech perception.