Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three factors in a sentence repetition task performed by children aged 4–7 and 11–12 years. It was found that semantic plausibility benefitted performance in both age groups; syntactic complexity disadvantaged the younger group but benefitted the older group; while contrary to previous findings, n-gram frequency did not facilitate, and in a post-hoc analysis even hampered, performance. This new evidence suggests that n-gram frequency effects might be restricted to the highly constrained and frequent n-grams used in previous investigations, and that semantics and morphosyntax play a more powerful role than n-gram frequency, supporting the role of abstract linguistic knowledge in children's sentence processing.

中文翻译：

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语义合理性、句法复杂性和 n-gram 频率对儿童句子重复的影响

语言处理理论在抽象句法和语义与表层词汇共现（n-gram）频率的作用方面有所不同。先前对儿童和成人的研究已经证明了这些因素中的每一个的贡献，但没有人对它们进行联合调查。本研究评估了所有三个因素在 4-7 岁和 11-12 岁儿童执行的句子重复任务中的作用。结果发现，语义合理性有利于两个年龄组的表现；句法复杂性对年轻群体不利，但对年长群体有利；虽然与之前的发现相反，n-gram 频率并没有促进，在事后分析中甚至阻碍了性能。