SVO SENTENCE COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES USED BY ITALIAN PRESCHOOL-CHILDREN

Research was carried out to investigate the linguistic strategies used by Italian pre-school children in order to understand agent-verb-object sentences. 96 children between the ages of 3 years 2 months and 5 years 10 months were examined Each was tested by means of acting-out task, according to a list of 54 sentences, and taking into consideration the following linguistic factors: semantic plausibility, word order and morphological agreement. The result show a marked predominance in the use of syntactic and semantic strategies throughout the whole sample group; profiles varied according to age. On the other hand, morphological factors were not found to be important in completing the task, not even among older children. The result of our research have been compared with other studies carried out on English and Italian.