The Effect of Word Order on Young Children's Responses to Simple Questions and Commands.

WETSTONE, HARRIET S., and FRIEDLANDER, BERNARD Z. The Effect of Word Order on Young Children's Responses to Simple Questions and Commands. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1973, 44, 734-740. 20 2and 3-year-old children were presented with simple questions and commands in the context of an at-home play situation. The questions and commands were spoken in varying degrees of word-order distortion in order to evaluate the communicative effectiveness of word order in the children's comprehension of meaning. The majority of the nonfluent children responded appropriately to both normal and scrambled sentences. Only the fluent children's response scores were significantly lower to scrambled sentences than to normal. Data suggest that young, nonfluent children's receptive language processing is focused on familiar semantic elements rather than on syntactic framework.