Le traitement des verbes d’action et mentaux dans les phrases avec proposition relative : réversibilité et complexité syntaxique

Previous work has demonstrated that sentences with actional verbs are better understood than nonactionals. The so-called actionality effect has been presented as restricted to passives. The present experiment was a comprehension task conducted with French-speaking children aged 5 to 7. We used active declarative sentences with a relative clause, embedded or not, reversible or not. In order to increase the complexity of the sentences, we have added a temporal complement in the relative clause. Results revealed an actionality effect, an interaction between actionality and reversibility indicating that the actionality effect is present in the sentences with a reversible relative clause. The actionality effect is interpreted in terms of mental imagery as suggested by Thibaut et al. (1993) for passive sentences