A New Method for Testing Language Comprehension Reveals Better Performance on Passive and Principle B Constructions

In this paper we report the results of an experimental study on the comprehension of passives sentences and of pronouns vs. anaphors (Delay of Principle B) in 58 Dutch children (3;11-8;7). The children were tested with two different methods: the Picture Selection Task (PST) and the Coloring Book (CB), a new method for testing language comprehension developed by the authors. The results of a larger comparative study in which the CB is compared with the PST confirm the validity of the CB method and show that it provides an average of 5% more adult-like answers than the PST, with a maximum effect of 25%. In this paper we focus on a part of this study showing that the data obtained with the CB shed new light on a number of issues on early language comprehension. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we introduce an in our view important methodological problem in language comprehension research, the Explicit Presence of Alternatives problem, and we discuss the conditions that have to be met in order to obtain clean linguistic data on comprehension. We also argue that the Coloring Book may be quite promising in this respect. In section 3 we present the results of the sub-study on passives and in section 4 the results of the sub-study on pronouns vs. anaphors (Delay of Principle B). In both cases the CB data reveal a better performance of the children across all groups/ages. The higher scores on the comprehension of these linguistic structures seem to suggest that children’s competence at this age is more adult like than claimed thus far. In section 5 we elaborate on the theoretical consequences of these findings and briefly summarize the main points of this study and make some suggestions for future research.