The comprehension of syntax.
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Abstract
Children were given a comprehension task consisting of the selection of pictures to match active and passive affirmative sentences. The amount of semantic content was varied by substituting nonsense words into some, all, or none of the content word spaces in the sentence frame. The picture content was either familiar or unfamiliar. It was found that there was s significant difference between conditions consisting of nonsense and those consisting of sense, although both were successfully achieved by older children. It was concluded that the grammatical construction had referential meaning. The difficulty of the nonsense sentences was localized in the verb and was explained in terms of the relational nature of the referent of a sentence.