Response Bias in Children's Judgments of Sense of Sentences

Abstract

Investigations of syntactic and semantic factors affecting children's sentence processing have relied on one of two experimental tasks: the children acting out the sentences or the children making judgments on whether the sentences are “silly” or not. In a study using the latter technique, a bias toward “silly” responses was evident, particularly amongst the 5-yr.-olds, the youngest group tested. It is suggested that the bias was due to the demands of the experimental task and that a similar bias may have been present in other studies using this technique, thereby vitiating their conclusions.