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Actionality and mental imagery in children's comprehension of declaratives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Jean-Pierre Thibaut ,
Jean A. Rondal  and
Anne-Marie KÄens
Jean-Pierre Thibaut*
Affiliation:
University of Liège
Jean A. Rondal
Affiliation:
University of Liège
Anne-Marie KÄens
Affiliation:
University of Liège
*
Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique, University of Liège, B32, Sart-Tilman, 4000-Liège, Belgium.
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Abstract

Previous work bas demonstrated that children understand sentences with actional verbs better than nonactional verbs. This ACTIONALITY EFFECT bas been reportee to be restricted to passives and to be independent of experimental context. The present experiment was conducted with 48 French-speaking children aged 5;0–7;11. The actionality effect was studied by systematically varying the voice of the test sentences and the voice of the interpretive requests. Pictures corresponding or not to the predicate—argument structure of the sentences were presented to the subjects, who were independently classified as visualizers or nonvisualizers, in order to investigate the relation between sentence actionality and mental imagery. The interaction between actionality, voice of sentence, and interpretive request revealed that the actionality effect depends on the type of task used in order to assess comprehension, and that it can be reversed in some conditions. Our results also suggest that the actionality effect is linked to mental imagery. Visualizers demonstrated better comprehension of actional sentences than nonvisualizers, whereas the reverse was true for nonactional sentences. Mental image may serve as a support for the computations involved in sentence comprehension.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 189 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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Footnotes

[*]

We are grateful to Michael Beveridge, Robert Hoffmeister and Alan Richardson-Klavehn for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

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