Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-ckgrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-06T20:19:13.017Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Preschool children's comprehension of agency*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Allayne Bridges
Allayne Bridges
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An acting-out task and two modified forms of the token-assignment task described by Braine & Wells (1978) were used to test the ability of 72 children aged 3;0–4;6 to identify the actor in an event; in one token-assignment task the children were required to respond after watching silent enactments of transitive events, and in the other the children heard verbal descriptions of similar events. Comparison of individual response patterns across the tasks revealed that whereas 62 of the 72 children could identify the actor in the non-verbal task, 19 of them subsequently failed to perform as well when they had to base their judgement on active sentences in the verbal task; and of the 44 who responded accurately in the verbal token-assignment task only 34 responded consistently correctly when required to act out those sentences. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of syntactic comprehension.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , October 1984 , pp. 593 - 610
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Angiolillo, C. J. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1982). Experimental evidence for agent–patient categories in child language. JChLang 9. 627–43.Google ScholarPubMed
Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1979). A functionalist approach to the acquisition of grammar. In Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. (eds), Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E., McNew, S., MacWhinney, B., Devescovi, A. & Smith, S. (1982). Functional constraints in sentence processing: a cross-linguistic study. Cognition 11. 245–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structure. In Hayes, J. R. (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Braine, M. S. & Wells, R. S. (1978). Case-like categories in children: the actor and some related categories. CogPsychol 10. 100–22.Google Scholar
Bridges, A. (1980). SVO comprehension strategies reconsidered: the evidence of individual patterns of response. JChLang 11. 89–104.Google Scholar
Chapman, R. S. & Kohn, L. L. (1978). Comprehension strategies in two and three year olds: animate agents or probable events? JSHR 18. 355–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Hecht, B. F. (1982). Learning to coin agent and instrument nouns. Cognition 12. 1–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cromer, R. (1981). Reconceptualising language acquisition and cognitive development. In Schiefelbusch, R. L. & Bricker, D. (eds), Early language: acquisition and intervention. Baltimore: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Dewart, M. H. (1979). Children's hypotheses about the animacy of actor and object nouns. BJPsych 70. 525–30.Google Scholar
Frankel, D. G. & Arbel, T. (1981). Developmental changes in assigning agent relations in Hebrew: the interaction between word order and structural cues. JExpChPsychol 32. 102–14.Google Scholar
Frankel, D. G., Amir, M., Frenkel, E. & Arbel, T. (1980). A developmental study of the role of word order in comprehending Hebrew. JExpChPsychol 29. 23–5.Google ScholarPubMed
Freeman, N. H., Sinha, C. G. & Stedmon, J. A. (1982). All the cars – which cars? From word meaning to discourse analysis. In Beveridge, M. (ed.) Children thinking through language. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M. (1981). The case of semantic relations: evidence from the verbal and nonverbal domains. JChLang 8. 413–37.Google ScholarPubMed
Graham, N. C. (1968). Short term memory and syntactic structure in educationally subnormal children. L & S 11. 209–19.Google ScholarPubMed
Grieve, R., Hoogenraad, R. & Murray, D. (1977). On the young child's use of lexis and syntax in understanding locative instructions. Cognition 5. 235–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, J. A. & Braine, M. S. (1981). Categories that bridge between meaning and syntax in five-year-olds. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), The child's construction of language. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1981). The grammatical marking of thematic structure in the development of language production. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), The child's contruction of language. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Lempert, H. (1978). Extrasyntactic factors affecting passive sentence comprehension by young children. ChDev 49. 694–9.Google Scholar
Lempert, H. & Kinsbourne, M. (1978). Children's comprehension of word order: a developmental investigation. ChDev 49, 1235–8.Google Scholar
Lempert, H. (1980). Preschool children's sentence comprehension: strategies with respect to word order. JChLang 7. 371–9.Google ScholarPubMed
Maratsos, M. P. & Chalkley, M. A. (1980). The internal language of children's syntax: the ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language, Vol. 2. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Sinclair, H. R. & Bronckart, J. P. (1972). SVO: a linguistic universal ? A study in developmental psycholinguistics. JExpChPsychol 14. 329–48.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1982). Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemes: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12. 229–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strohner, H. & Nelson, K. (1974). The young child's development of sentence comprehension: the influence of event probability, non-verbal context, syntactic form and strategies. ChDev 45. 567–76.Google Scholar
Turner, E. A. & Rommetveit, R. (1968). Focus of attention in recall of active and passive sentences. JvLVB 7. 543–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, L. K. (1981). Syntactic and interpretative factors in the development of language comprehension. In Deutsch, W.(ed.), The child's construction of language. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Walkington, I. (1984). Noun animacy in young children's sentence comprehension. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham.Google Scholar