Reading skill and the minimum distance principle: a comparison of listening and reading comprehension.

Abstract Experiment I compared the listening and reading comprehension of sentences which follow the Minimum Distance Principle, e.g., John tells Bill to bake the cake , and of those which do not, e.g., John promises Bill to bake the cake . Third, fourth, and fifth graders were tested. Support for Chomsky's Stage analysis of mastery of the Minimum Distance Principle was found for the listening but not for the reading task. Reading skill level was found to be positively correlated with Stage and a significantly better predictor of promise performance than was age or IQ. Experiment II investigated the effect of the composition of the experimental presentation list on performance by comparing comprehension when the list contained only promise or tell sentences with that obtained when the list contained both types of sentences. For half the subjects, performance differed as a function of the list composition: Implications of these findings for the assessment of the development of language competence are discussed.

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