The Sentence Structure sub-test (SST) of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF) aims to “measure the acquisition of grammatical (structural) rules at the sentence level”. Although originally designed for clinical practice with monolingual children, components of the CELF, such as the SST, are often used to inform psycholinguistic research. Raw scores are also commonly used to estimate the English proficiency of bilingual children. This study queries the reliability of the SST as an index of children's ability to deal with structural complexity in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates that cognitive complexity induces a considerable confound in the task, affecting 5- to 7-year-old monolinguals (n = 87) and bilinguals (n = 87) alike.

语言基础临床评估 (CELF) 的句子结构子测试 (SST) 旨在“测量句子级别的语法（结构）规则的获得”。尽管最初设计用于单语儿童的临床实践，但 CELF 的组成部分，如 SST，通常用于为心理语言学研究提供信息。原始分数也常用于评估双语儿童的英语水平。本研究质疑 SST 作为儿童处理句子理解结构复杂性能力的指标的可靠性，并证明认知复杂性会在任务中引起相当大的混淆，影响 5 至 7 岁的单语者（n = 87 ) 和双语者 (n = 87) 一样。