Psychológia a patopsychológia dieťaťa, 53, 2019, č. 2, s. 75–88

SENTENCE COMPREHENSION OF SLOVAK-SPEAKING CHILDREN AGED 10 TO 14

Sentence comprehension is a complex process in which a semantic role is assigned to an actor. The authors analysed the performance of 67 healthy Slovak-speaking children aged 10-14 years in understanding multiple syntactic constructions. The child’s task was to assign one of the four pictures to a heard sentence. In the presented pictures, either the actor or an elaborative phrase added to one of the actors (e. g. which actor has a black dress) were varied. In the sentences the actors could change their semantic roles. Performances of children were compared to performances of younger children aged 8 to 10 years and to performances of adult respondents (from 18 to 49 years) gained in previous studies. Among the children aged 10 to 14 there were no differences in syntactic construction comprehension in terms of age, sex or mother’s level of education. However, the results suggest that the performance of older school-aged children is better than the performance of younger children but their comprehension does not reach the adult level and continues to develop beyond the age of 14.