Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined adult and 10-13 year old skilled and average comprehenders' representation of spoken sentences. In immediate probe tasks, skilled adults were better than average adults at accessing word order information, but they were poorer at accessing sentence meaning. After hearing a text, skilled adults were more accurate than average adults in recognizing meaning, but they were less accurate in recognizing the wording of test sentences. Speeded speech increased the differences between skill groups more for memory for wording than for memory for meaning. The results suggest that comprehenders compute representations of surface form and meaning independently and simultaneously. These representations compete for attention.