ACTIONALITY AND MENTAL-IMAGERY IN CHILDRENS COMPREHENSION OF DECLARATIVES

Previous work has demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This ACTIONALITY EFFECT has been reported to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5;0-7;11. The actionality effect was stu died by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate-argument structure of the sentences were presented to th e subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvis ualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence action ality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice o f sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality eff ect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also sugg est that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualize rs demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvis ualizers, whereas the reverse was true for nonactional sentences. Ment al image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sente nce comprehension.