Children up to school age are known to have difficulty comprehending complex sentences with temporal connectives, but the reasons remain controversial. We tested six- to twelve-year-old children to assess how the iconicity of event-language mapping, type of connective, and clause order mediate the comprehension of temporal sentences. Sixty monolingual Greek-speaking children and 15 adult controls completed a picture-sequence selection task in which they judged after- and before-sentences in iconic and non-iconic order. Up to age twelve, children did not reach full adult-like comprehension of the connectives; performance in non-iconic after-sentences was significantly lower than in the other three conditions across all ages. We conclude that neither iconicity, connective, nor clause order can fully explain these findings and propose an account based on the interaction of iconicity and clause order: non-iconic, sentence-medial after requires revision of the initial event representation, resulting in an event-semantic kindergarten-path that children find difficult to overcome.

中文翻译：

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理解包含时间连接词的复杂句子：如何引导儿童走上事件语义幼儿园路径


众所周知，学龄儿童在理解带有时间连接词的复杂句子时存在困难，但其原因仍然存在争议。我们测试了六到十二岁的儿童，以评估事件语言映射的象似性、连接词类型和从句顺序如何调节时间句子的理解。 60 名只会说希腊语的儿童和 15 名成人对照组完成了图片序列选择任务，他们在其中判断后- 和前-按标志性和非标志性顺序排列的句子。直到十二岁，孩子们还没有达到像成人一样对连接词的完全理解。非标志性表现后-所有年龄段的句子均显着低于其他三种情况。我们的结论是，象似性、连接词或子句顺序都不能完全解释这些发现，并提出一种基于象似性和子句顺序相互作用的解释：非象形性、句子中间形式后需要修改最初的事件表示，导致儿童难以克服事件语义幼儿园路径。