Redundancy of syntactic information: an aid to young children's comprehension of sentential number.

Sentences conveying either non-redundant or increasingly redundant information about number, by means of different syntactic markers, were presented to 20 nursery school children. Comprehension of each sentence was tested in two tasks: pointing to one of a pair of line drawings and acting out with toys the action described by a sentence. The results strongly supported the view that redundancy of syntactic information is a powerful aid to children's comprehension of sentential number. In a second experiment, comprehension of sentences conveying redundant information by repetition of the same number marker was compared with that of non-redundant sentences. In contrast to the first experiment, redundancy had no significant effect on comprehension. Together, these results suggest that children's comprehension of sentential number if aided by redundancy of information involving different syntactic markers, but not by mere repetition of the same marker.