Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sentence comprehension involves integrating multiple cues varying in salience and reliability across structures. A key question is how children weight these cues across sentence types over development. This study examined how Spanish-speaking children aged 3 to 11 years integrate word order, morphological marking, and syntactic embedding. Using a sentence–picture matching task, we assessed comprehension accuracy for five structures differing in canonicity and complexity. Group-level analyses revealed a clear developmental ordering, with early success for structures with canonical word order, more gradual improvement for structures requiring morphosyntactic cues to override linear order, and persistent difficulty when non-canonical order was combined with syntactic embedding. Profile-based analyses showed substantial individual variability, with distinct patterns of strengths and weaknesses across structures among same-age children. These findings indicate that sentence comprehension development reflects both age-related gains in accuracy and differences in cue weighting across structures, highlighting the value of combining developmental and individual-level approaches.