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On-line experiments, which provide a source of data common in adult psycholinguistics, are rare in developmental psycholinguistics. Our study uses an on-line task modified for examining children's real-time sentence processing. We compare children's and adults' interpretation of certain co-reference relations in a cross-modal picture decision task. Both children's and adults' reaction times distinguish between reflexives and pronouns. Further analysis of the child subjects, based on their performance in an offline experiment, shows two subgroups whose on-line performance was consistent with their off-line performance. We discuss two ways in which such data might prove useful, namely, to address questions concerning the development of the language processor and to illuminate “classic” problems in the acquisition of grammar.

Three lexical decision experiments are reported that test the use of inflectional and word-order strategies by adult readers of Serbo-Croatian to assign syntactic roles of subject and object. No word-order effects are observed when both syntactic roles are specified unambiguously by inflection (Experiment 1) or when the object's inflection only is unambiguous (Experiment 3). Word-order influences on lexical decision are obtained when neither syntactic role is specified (Experiment 3) and when the subject's inflection only is unambiguous (Experiment 2). Results are discussed in terms of word-byword vs clausal processing and, more generally, in terms of Forster's model of the language processor.