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Abstract

Sentence comprehension is a complex process htat takes a long time to fully develop. The results of the present experiments indicate that even at 11 years of age, children have not yet fully established adult processing routines. In order to determine 'who ist doing what to whom' shool-aged children still use linguistic cues in a differnt way to adults. In particular, the ERP experiments suggest that 8-year-old children do not distinguish between abstract thematic and synatctic representations. Only three years later, at 11 years of age, children are able to distinguish between these two reprentational hierarchies. However, even they have not yet reached the adult stage. Lexical verb representations still have to be refined, a developmental process that presumably takes place during the later teenage years. Moreover, the experiments also pinted out that the processes of adult sentence comprehension are far from being completely understood. Interestingly, the children's data helped on the interpretation of syntax related ERP components. However, differences between auditory and previous visual dat indicated that a lot more experiments will be necessary in order to resolve the mystery of on-line sentence comprehension.