Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children’s understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension.

The sentences in texts are far more complex and diverse than those that children commonly encounter in oral language. This raises interesting questions as to whether the understanding of some sentence types might be more important than others in children’s reading comprehension. Accordingly, we examined the relation between children’s reading comprehension and their understanding of two types of sentences: one we label as basic sentences, which...