Understanding complex sentences that contain multiple clauses referring to events in the world and the relations between them is an important development in children's language learning. A number of theoretical positions have suggested that factors like syntactic structure (clause order), iconicity (whether the order of clauses reflects the order of events), and givenness (whether information is shared between speakers) affect ease of comprehension. We tested these accounts by investigating how these factors interact in British English-speaking children's comprehension of complex sentences with adverbial clauses (after, before, because, if), while controlling for language level, working memory and inhibitory control. 92 children in three age groups (4, 5 and 8 years) and 17 adults completed a picture selection task. Participants heard an initial context sentence, followed by a two-clause sentence which varied in: (1) the order of the main and subordinate clause; (2) the order of given and new information; and (3) whether the given information occurred in the main or subordinate clause. Accuracy and response times were measured. Our results showed that given-before-new improves comprehension for four- and five-year-olds, but only when the given information is in the initial subordinate clause (e.g., "Sue crawls on the floor. Before she crawls on the floor, she hops up and down"). Temporal adverbials (after, before) were processed faster than causal adverbials (because, if). These effects were not found for the eight-year-olds, whose performance was more similar to that of the adults. Providing a context sentence also improved performance compared to presenting the test sentences in isolation. We conclude that existing accounts based on either ease of processing or information structure cannot fully account for these findings, and suggest a more integrated explanation which reflects children's developing language and literacy skills.

中文翻译：

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儿童处理复杂句子中的给定性和从句顺序之间的相互作用。

理解包含多个涉及世界事件的从句的复杂句子以及它们之间的关系是儿童语言学习的重要发展。许多理论立场表明，句法结构（分句顺序）、象似性（分句顺序是否反映事件顺序）和给定性（说话者之间是否共享信息）等因素会影响理解的难易程度。我们通过调查这些因素如何在英国英语儿童对带有状语从句（之后、之前、因为、如果）的复杂句子的理解中相互作用，同时控制语言水平、工作记忆和抑制控制，来测试这些帐户。三个年龄组（4、5 和 8 岁）的 92 名儿童和 17 名成人完成了图片选择任务。参与者听到一个最初的上下文句子，然后是一个两分句的句子，其变化如下：（1）主从句的顺序；(2) 给定信息和新信息的顺序；(3) 给定的信息是出现在主句还是从句中。测量了准确性和响应时间。我们的研究结果表明，给四岁和五岁儿童的理解能力提高了，但前提是给定的信息在最初的从句中（例如，“苏在地板上爬行。在她在地板上爬行之前，她跳上跳下”）。时间状语（之后，之前）比因果状语（因为，如果）处理得更快。八岁的孩子没有发现这些影响，他们的表现与成年人的表现更相似。与单独呈现测试句子相比，提供上下文句子也提高了性能。我们得出的结论是，基于易于处理或信息结构的现有账户不能完全解释这些发现，并提出了一个更综合的解释，以反映儿童发展中的语言和识字技能。