We investigate developmental changes in the nature and timing of sentence interpretation in Italian, focusing on the contributions of morphological, syntactic and semantic information to the assignment of agent-object roles. College students and children between 5 and 10 years of age were asked to decide 'who did the action?' in response to auditory sentences reflecting orthogonal combinations of subject-verb-agreement, word order and noun animacy. Analyses of both agent choice and reaction time provide support for the cue validity and cue strength predictions of the Competition Model, an interactive-activation theory of language processing and development. They also provide new information about reorganization and consolidation of sentence processing strategies in Italian children, including protracted changes from 5 years of age to adulthood in the use of subject-verb agreement, and a plateau in reaction times from 7 to 10 years of age, the period in which children make the transition from a primary reliance on animacy to the overwhelming reliance on morphological cues that characterizes sentence processing in Italian adults.
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