It has been found that an information-processing analysis of latencies collected in an immediate sentence recall task using children with median age 4 years 4 months favors a serial processing mechanism. This mechanism consists of three major parts: (1) The detection of a clausal boundary; (2) the assesssment of whether or not the observed nounverb-no structure satisfies a unique semantic constraint (in terms of the meaningfulness of interchanging its two clausal nouns); and (3) the assessment of whether the observed surface sequence satisfies a canonical order of subject-verb-object. (Author/DP) (36pp.)
